Professional ratings
Aggregate scores
Source	Rating
Metacritic	71/100
Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic
The A.V. Club	A−
The Guardian
Los Angeles Times
NME	5/10
Pitchfork Media	8.6/10
PopMatters
Rolling Stone
Slant Magazine
Spin	8/10

Zonoscope is the third studio album by Australian electronic music band Cut Copy, released on 4 February 2011 by Modular Recordings. Recorded in Melbourne in 2010, the album received generally positive reviews from music critics. Zonoscope reached number three on the ARIA Albums Chart, becoming the band's second highest-peaking album after In Ghost Colours, which topped the chart in 2008.

At the ARIA Music Awards of 2011, Zonoscope won Best Dance Release and the Artisan Award for Best Cover Art, and was nominated for Album of the Year. It was also nominated for Best Dance/Electronica Album at the 54th Annual Grammy Awards in 2012.

The album's official title and release date were announced exclusively through Spin magazine on 2 November 2010. In an interview with musicOMH, guitarist Tim Hoey said, "I guess we finished touring In Ghost Colours, and we wanted to strip away what we'd done before and re-imagine sonically with different synths and guitars. We also wanted percussion to become more of a feature, because we had this idea of creating a rhythmic, hypnotic record where time becomes irrelevant." He explained that the album's title, Zonoscope, means "a variety of things", adding, "It was an instrument for us, but it's also the lens you would use to view this kind of world. We wanted Zonoscope to represent this record."

Zonoscope was recorded over a six-month period in a warehouse space in Fairfield, Melbourne, littered with discarded vintage recording gear and instruments. "There was no Internet in there, barely any heat, nothing, just fucking industrial Melbourne", Hoey said. "We just knew we could kind of go into there and not feel pressured. We were just kind of locked in there by ourselves, and we couldn't have had it sounding how it sounds without us going in there." In an interview with Pitchfork Media, Whitford described the album's recording as "a much more open-ended process where we just sort of went off on these more jammy tangents where we'd just sit there and play stuff for 10 minutes and see what happened—we might end up putting out a 10-disc box set of all the weird extended jams we did on this record. There's more of a repetitive, hypnotic, rhythmic aspect to a lot of the tracks."

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