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 itsinfluence 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.
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