Tops "Bury the Key" ["Muck" Vinyl]

TOPS — musicians David Carriere, Jane Penny, Marta Cikojevic, and Riley Fleck — write timeless music that reliably threads immediacy and depth. Bury the Key, their first full-length since 2020 and with new label home Ghostly International, is a captivating reintroduction for the Montréal band: ever refined, undoubtedly masters of their melodic craft yet unafraid of evolving and testing themselves against different, at times darker tones. The album faces feelings once locked away, engaging the give-and-take between happiness, hedonism, and self-destruction. While often inhabited by fictional figures, their glowing, grooving, self-produced songs draw from personal observations: intimacy (both inside and outside the band), toxic behavior, drug use, and apocalyptic dread. When recording started, they noticed a shift and leaned in, jokingly dubbed "evil TOPS," says Penny. "We're always kind of seen as a soft band or like naive or friendly in a Canadian way, but we made it a challenge to really channel the world around us." Through the lens of a looming epoch and the clarity that comes with age, TOPS dip into a more sinister disco realm with Bury the Key, giving their soft-focus sophisti-pop a sharpened edge.

Emerging from Montréal's DIY scene in the early 2010s as progenitors of an indie pop sound still radiating its influence across the contemporary landscape, TOPS’ secret to longevity is simple: keep the songwriting honest and open-hearted and the recording unforced yet pristine, allowing for a band dynamic deeply attuned at every level. Their songs outline the silhouettes of life, and as time goes on — now five LPs, countless tours, and various side projects in — TOPS have only gotten better at what they do.

The voice of TOPS is Jane Penny, a songwriter, producer, flutist, and singer whose hushed delivery hosts a deceivingly vast range of expression and has surely informed a wave of today's greats from Men I Trust to Clairo. Her lyrical subjects never go out of style: dynamics of power, desire, struggles to be seen, having love requited or otherwise. Following her move back to Montréal and first solo release in 2024, Penny returns to the neighborhoods of her former self a step wiser; the sleek cars and forever highways of her songs, penned with her rhythmic counterpart David Carriere, find assured depth in Bury the Key. Carriere, a songwriter, producer, and guitarist with a flair for high-sheen hooks and the relentless drive to match (other projects include DVC Refreshments and Born At Midnite), adds to his bag of tonal and textural tricks. Drummer Riley Fleck, the band's heartbeat since day one and occasional gun for others (Jessica Pratt's live band as of late), broadens his utility, venturing into higher and harder tempos. Keyboardist Marta Cikojevic, who joined TOPS in 2017 just before the landmark I Feel Alive and in 2022 released her breakout debut as Marci (produced by Carriere), expands her role here as well, joining the writing process and backing Penny for some of the record's fullest, most satisfying vocal lines.

It is rare to see a band so aligned and complete, self-sufficient, specialized but agile and ambitious, reaching an elite level of pop precision as their legacy remains largely unwritten. They've toured the world over, from major festivals to the dingiest of dives, sleeping on floors and tour-managing themselves for years, manifesting their success the hard way. Beyond work ethic, it also comes down to chemistry and taste; when pressed for which artists get airplay in their van, some expected names appear, Fleetwood Mac and Steely Dan, but dig deeper and the veneer of artists like China Crisis, Prefab Sprout, and Francois Hardy, Missing Persons, and Everything But the Girl start to fill out the playlist. An instinct for luster and thrills, songs both sweet and bleak, brings the band to Bury the Key.

Writing began in the winter of 2023, with Penny and Carriere working on demos that they would build out further over loose and collaborative sessions that summer in the band's studio, which has a vibe they liken to a 1970s tax office. Various personas and characters took shape; on the synth-driven "Wheels At Night," Penny initially imagined a widowed character ("nothing left in here but your clothes next to mine") before spinning it into a more universal loss, what is ultimately a break-up song about dealing with yourself and the discomfort of being alone. Carriere's guitar lines dazzle over the bridge before the narrator leaves us dreaming on a lonesome road. "ICU2" is pure flirtation, a classic uptempo TOPS song sprung from a playful exchange between Penny and Cikojevic. Beneath the grooves, though, the hide-and-seek club scene hints at a hall of mirrors, "almost like a caper, fantastical, like you've been caught searching for something in the dark," says Penny, citing the art house psychedelia of the party scene in Midnight Cowboy (1969).

The shadows of Bury the Key become more pronounced as the album unfolds. Approaching the midpoint, "Annihilation" is the proper heel-turn. It surfaced from a non-traditional exercise; Fleck was challenged to draft a song from the drums, yielding a field of rapid hi-hats, fills, and four-on-the-floor beats for the band to build on. Written shortly after the deaths of Ryuichi Sakamoto and Sinead O'Connor, it's an homage to a cultural mythology that's slowly vanishing ("all the greatest men and women die my friend") with the sleek, futuristic chorus nodding to Yellow Magic Orchestra. The super-charged "Falling On My Sword" channels Carriere's interest in hardcore music from an arrangement perspective, "but played in our style, in the end," he says. "We've always pushed against the idea of changing or reinventing," says Penny. "But we did want to push the envelope of our sound and try something we haven't made before; we wanted to go a bit harder." Lyrics question the pursuit of societal norms and institutions of adulthood that often leave us unfulfilled.

The centerpiece is "Chlorine," an "empty love" ballad that crosses toxins, the nostalgia of chemical-filled waterparks, and the comfort of an unhealthy bar night. "The emotional spectrum of how you grow up, the things we experience, the ways that we fill ourselves up may also be the things that destroy us," Penny explains. The notion's weight is felt throughout Bury the Key, a prismatic album polished out of the rough. Grounded by pain and pleasure, the complicated joys of being alive, of being a band from one of our era's finest.