Somewhere in Brisbane, a few random motorcyclists are going about their lives, completely unaware they've been immortalised on Silver Sircus's latest album.
No auditions required – just perfect timing as they rumbled down a Mount Nebo road. That road took them past the studio where Silver Sircus were recording their new album, 'METAL'.A rich reimagining of Gary Numan's 1978-1981 era, the album sinks into the enigmatic musician's electronic classics, revealing the raw humanity that hums beneath the synth-heavy surface.
Songs like 'Stormtrooper In Drag' and 'Are Friends Electric' feel perfectly at home in 2025 – a time when people turn to AI for everything from crafting the perfect breakup text to figuring out if that weird pain means they're dying.
Given he composed them 40-plus years ago, Numan's explorations of the human-machine dynamic are eerily prophetic. It feels like we've somehow ended up living in a Gary Numan album, and Silver Sircus's reimagining of his dystopian android fever dreams couldn't be better timed.
Speaking to us from their sun-dappled back deck, Silver Sircus singer Lucinda Shaw agrees that Numan captured something simultaneously timeless and ahead of its time.
"These songs talk to the discomfort, the sense of strangeness that we have as social beings living in a machine world. The more you listen to Gary Numan, the more of a sense of human empathy you get for that unsettled uneasiness that a lot of us actually have deep down."
The project began in 2018 when Lucinda and drummer/ pianist James Lees performed a stripped-back version of 'Are Friends Electric' at Brisbane's Padre Bar. The audience response was so enthusiastic they expanded the concept for a special 'Blacklight' performance during Anywhere Theatre Festival.
"It was so warmly received that audiences said 'please record it' and so the beginning of the new Silver Sircus album was born," Lucinda recalls.
Rather than 'covering' Numan's songs, James and Lucinda prefer the term 'uncovering' – stripping away the canopy of synthesisers to reveal the dark, resonant undergrowth beneath.
The resulting album switches out Numan's sharp, electronic soundscapes for a softer palate of piano, cellos, and subtle touches of drums, guitar, and bass. "Replacing that synthpop with a dark chamber world just spoke to the dark blood of the songs," Lucinda says.
It wasn't just random motorcyclists who made it into the final cut of the album. During their exploratory recording sessions at Mount Nebo with producer Jamie Trevaskis (known for his work with Robert Forster and Mexico City), Silver Sircus embraced the unorthodox, finding unique ways to capture the clash of music and metal.
"James gets out the cymbal scrapes and Mark Angel has ways of creating gritty noise when he plays guitar," Lucinda says, eyes sweeping the deck as though we're back in the studio watching James and Mark at work. "He has all sorts of fun pedals and literally bits of metal that he scrapes against his guitar strings."
Though it was a group decision to take on the Numan project, Lucinda has a personal connection to his music that stretches back to childhood – a time when Numan's gender-bending appearance and otherworldly presence were transformative.
"When you're a kid, there's something in the visibility of popular culture that just immediately speaks to you, and you become energised into your adolescence through that," they recall.
"One image I have is seeing Gary Numan do 'Are Friends Electric' and going, 'what the hell is this? This is so exciting.'" For Lucinda, who identifies as non-binary, Numan's presence was as revolutionary as his music.
Like David Bowie, Numan represented something transcendent for Lucinda. "Those sorts of artists stood out as being really different to some of the more junky kind of pop; and I realised that serious lyrics about the mental experience of being fully human were what mattered to me."
If you strip away the music for a moment and read Numan's lyrics like poems, you'll quickly find yourself eyeballs deep in a sense of social alienation brought to life through science fiction metaphors.
More recently, Numan has revealed that many of his early songs described his own neurodivergent experience through the lens of sci-fi. "I think there is a lot of language in recent times for experiences of neurodivergence, but in many ways the poetic expression of his lyrics captures what it is to feel alien within humanity and society," Lucinda explains.
As an actor and former counsellor, Lucinda brings a profound sense of empathy to Numan's subtle and often provocative lyrics. "I have a rule for myself that I'm not allowed to sing somebody else's lyrics until I've really got fully into what I believe the meaning is.
"Any artist I sing will definitely impact me, and [Numan] carries such an understanding of the disquiet of our human experience in these times. There's something particular about his music that makes it feel like it's from the past and the future at once."
For Silver Sircus, a band whose undefinable personality shifts between art rock, electronica, post-rock, prog and chamber folk elements, this Numan project represents a natural evolution.
"We're the sort of artists that are very passionate about what we create. They're not light, fluffy songs. They have a lot of depth to them and our influences are quite dark, but very beautiful, haunting sounds that we are really happy to go into because we want to make music that has a real truth to it."
'METAL' is currently available on Bandcamp. Silver Sircus launch the album at Alchemix Studios (Brisbane) 12 July.
