A staple of the Melbourne music scene, Zoë Fox and her band The Rocket Clocks have spent the better part of the last five years wooing audiences around town with their astronomical psychedelia, combined with an enigmatic live show. With nothing but three singles to keep us satisfied over the years, she’s finally unveiled her debut album and the wait was well worth it - as stimulating as it is hypnotic, Clockwerks picks up where the previous singles left off, but finds Zoë travelling further down the rabbit hole as she pushes the wonderful idiosyncrasies of her disco/psych/electro mishmash to their extremes.

Opening with the dizzying slowburn of ‘Perfume’, we’re introduced to Clockwerks with one of the album’s most mild moments. It’s a surprising way to start a pop album, but ‘Perfume’ serves its purpose perfectly - after beginning with woozy guitars that wrap around Zoë’s velvety vocals, the track expands with a pulsating groove and it feels as if we’re being slowly teleported into the surreal sonic universe that Zoë and her band have conjured. Followed by the first of four ‘Earthling Interludes’, a reoccurring detour into disorientating spoken-word blurred with space-age sound collages, and it’s clear that we’ve been transported somewhere else as the uncanny atmosphere becomes fully set.

Up next is ‘Spare Me The Time’, an album highlight that reveals Zoë’s affinity for disco with its bouncing groove and swirling guitar and synth interplay, and moments later this mood is recreated on the playful ‘Mr Gravity’, a track that has Zoë sounding uncharacteristically bored in spite of the infectious bass and eccentric layered percussion. However, it’s not long before Zoë’s back to her charismatic self - whether it be on the vibrant psych-pop of ‘Microwave Madness’ or the hazardous blitz of whimsy that makes up ‘Tiny Little Robots’.

After the effortlessly cool ‘Shiny Car’, which somehow manages to feel futuristic and gloriously retro at once, Clockwerks rounds out with the captivating ‘Tin Can Man’, a final reminder of what makes Zoë Fox and the Rocket Clocks so uniquely compelling. As Zoë’s voice drifts over a backdrop of gleaming, almost clinical synthesisers, it's made apparent that although the band’s stylised quirks are undeniably fun, it’s Zoë’s enthusiasm and starry-eyed charm that embeds these songs with colour and life, and not the other way around - and with that, it’s time for one last interstellar dance-party before Clockwerks fades away.

Perfume

Inspired by some of the themes in Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, a 1985 literary-historical-fantasy novel by German writer Patrick Süskind.

I was so taken by the way that the author described scent and the notion of something being so powerful that people are consumed by it. Consuming is a theme that I think a lot about. I took this notion of being intoxicated by something and paired it with my reflection on society and the human search for satisfaction.

Spare Me The Time

This song is about not wasting your precious mind power on unworthy subjects. Inspired by love games and situations that play on your mind and leave their mark, making it almost impossible to think about anything else. 

Mr Gravity

‘Mr Gravity’ is a one-sided phone conversation with someone who is bringing you down. It draws similarities between certain systems within our society and themes in dysfunctional relationships.

A common theme in a lot of my songs is the connection between humans, technology and our relationship with nature. I like to relate characters in songs to robots, and in this one, I refer to Mr Gravity as “my mechanical friend”, a direct reference to the 1960’s television series Lost in Space. 

Fins 

This is a song about a dream that I had - I was in a small country town. A few people roamed the almost deserted streets with an eerie edge about them but I wasn’t sure what it was… they had sort of pointed faces and beady eyes that would dart about.

I went into a general store and down a few stairs into an underground room that had a big hole in the wall. The hole looked through to the other side of the galaxy. I sat there for ages, completely in awe. Some people that I knew from a few other Melbourne bands came in and started pumping a white lotion and covering their faces with it. I remember thinking ”what’s the lotion? I didn’t see that over there before'' and they said “Zoe, looking at the stars is very beautiful, but it’s giving off radiation that’s turning people into sharks.”

It was then I knew that it was too late for me, as a stargazer, and I stepped through the hole and ended up on a radioactive beach, walking out into the ocean with the many other stargazers, now complete with fins.

Microwave Madness 

We were all sitting around with the guitar and I was asked to play a song. A good friend of mine who is a games master and the joker of the deck, looked across to me with a sparkle in his eyes and said “yeah Zoe, why don’t you play that song about microwaves?” I knew then and there that it was a Z-style free style that only the two of us were in on, and the rest of the party received this song as my response.

What the hell even are microwaves? I was told as a kid not to stand too close to the microwave oven and believed any food contained cooked in such a way would kill me or give me superpowers. Or cancer.

Fun fact - you can only see the black hole in the sky with microwaves. 

Tiny Little Robots

A tongue twister involving “tiny little robots in tiny little rowboats”. I wanted to create a machine driven scenario of a robot invasion, with the suggestion that no matter how hard you try, robots will find their way inside your mind. This reflects the darker side to human's relationship with technology and the plains of possibility for its future. Are you brainwashed by your phone? 

Shiny Car

Playful like a children’s schoolyard song in a jump rope game, 'Shiny Car' is a bouncy ride through the neighborhood. Although the songs sounds cheery, the content refers to being trapped in a cool looking car that is driving you around and you seem to have no control. A strapped-in passenger headed in the wrong direction. 

Tin Can Man 

I have an enormous tin can collection at home. I tried to make lots of things out of them. First I made a few of those old walkie talkie things with the string in between, and then later took to filling them with soil and potting succulents inside. I went a bit crazy with it and created a border around my house of tin can plants. I started painting pictures of Australian animals and wrapping them around and giving them to friends and family as birthday and Christmas gifts.

One housemate semi-cracked it at me for my fascination with saving and desperately trying to reuse all the rubbish and it inspired me to write this. I wrote “what’s gone and land-filled your head with this nonsense? Where’s your brain?” as a reference to Australia's recycling going into landfill and how it seems so silly. It’s also a reference to The Wizard of Oz and in the song I talk about taking the Tin Can Man back to the wizard to get him a heart. 

Earthling Interludes

Throughout the album, you can hear me as a sort of extraterrestrial being (potentially an artificial intelligence), interviewing an earthling and asking about time, space and technology. 

The old man interviewed is actually my grandad, a man with old fashioned ideas but a love for technology. He pays for things with his Apple watch and is a terrifying tech-whizz. He has been a big inspiration for this album, constantly challenging my ideas of the world and making me reflect on the many ways in which things change and evolve over time. He and I share a love for poetry and clocks.