Approaching the album’s midpoint, latest single ‘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.

“’Annihilation’ is a song about navigating a world on the edge of collapse” the band comment. “It’s easy to fear the future but in the end nothing is ever finished and you just gotta follow your heart. It’s like a mix of complacency and surrendering.”

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TOPS — musicians Jane Penny, David Carriere, 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.

Today the band share the album’s centrepiece with new single ‘Chlorine,’ an “empty love” ballad that crosses toxins, the nostalgia of chemical-filled waterparks, and the comfort of an unhealthy bar night.

Jane explains: “At one point I was caught in a cycle of going out to the bar hoping that I would cross paths with a certain person who was not good for me but who I felt irresistibly drawn to. I grew up in Edmonton, Alberta, where it’s very cold and I used to go to the pool a lot in the winter. It’s also where I first started going to bars to drink with my friends. I was thinking about alcohol and chlorine both being poison, thinking about all the people that I’ve tried to be close to that have ended up being bad for me, how I still love them all, and I wrote the song ‘Chlorine.'”

Bury the Key:

1. Stars Come After You
2. Wheels at Night
3. ICU2
4. Outstanding in the Rain
5. Annihilation
6. Falling on my Sword
7. Call You Back
8. Chlorine
9. Mean Streak
10. Your Ride
11. Standing at the Edge of Fire
12. Paper House

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Their signing to Ghostly marks the start of a new chapter and their first new music since 2022’s self-released Empty Seats EP.

New single ‘ICU2’ is pure flirtation, a classic uptempo TOPS song sprung from a playful exchange between Jane Penny and Marta 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 song arrives alongside a throwback music video; enter the world of the crate and see what magic unfolds.

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