Over the last five years, optical atomic clocks have realized a staggering 18 digits of precision and accuracy. Well beyond simple timekeeping, this performance has facilitated their application to searches for dark matter, tests of fundamental physics, and metrology supporting the re-definition of the SI second. Further advances promise to open the door to gravitational studies, including beyond-state-of-the-art Earth-based geodesy, space-based tests of general relativity, and even clock-based observations of gravitational waves. I’ll briefly review some of the progress that has brought us to this point, and then describe some current efforts towards a new generation of higher performance atomic timekeepers. I’ll focus the discussion on optical lattice clocks, which rely on ultracold atoms tightly trapped in a magic-wavelength optical lattice potential. Since their inception, these clocks have constantly battled an important systematic effect afflicting the lattice clock with its largest uncancelled frequency shift, the blackbody Stark effect. I’ll describe our re-cent strategy to deal with this perturbation, shrinking its effect by orders of magnitude beyond current state-of-the-art uncertainty budgets. I’ll also highlight techniques to independently con-trol multiple sub-ensembles of ultracold atoms within the optical lattice, and how this can be lev-eraged to measure subtle high-order light shifts associated with confinement in the lattice. Final-ly, I’ll conclude by describing our recent efforts to develop versions of these advanced clocks that can operate beyond the lab, towards revolutionizing geodesy of the future.