Clock Opera came chiming out of London in 2012 with Ways to Forget, a collection of synth-powered chop-pop songs that earned the band a CoSign at that year’s South by Southwest. The album was musically built on buoyant, Peter Gabriel-esque compositions, but the themes were something darkly cerebral. As they’re returning from an almost three year hiatus, the quartet is settling even more heavily into the gloaming.

Last year’s “Changeling” was a sinister sample of Clock Opera’s forthcoming sophomore album, out this summer. New single “In Memory” is even further covered in murk. Over ghostly chords and a rhythm that the dead would march to, singer and lyricist Guy Connelly falsetto floats like a knife through fog. The track crawls through on the knees of the type of synth notes that assure you this is still very much Clock Opera as it makes its way to a haunted dance floor for the final outro.



“We got what/ We wished for,” Connelly warns on the chorus. “We’re going to live forever in memory.” But that’s not the type of memory you might think. “I was thinking a lot about the huge transition we are collectively undergoing from memory held in individual and society’s brains,” he explained in a press release. “Obviously we’re not all robot husks just yet, but a lot more of what we ‘know’ doesn’t live in our brains anymore and it’s a trajectory that I expect to continue. Most people go a long way in order to forget things, me included and I think we’re beginning to get what we asked for.”

Take a listen to “In Memory” below.

Download the track now via Clock Opera’s website.