Outside

TOPS came up out of Montréal's DIY scene in the early 2010s, and the band now runs David Carriere, Jane Penny, Marta Cikojevic and Riley Fleck. Five albums, countless tours and a pile of side projects later, the method hasn't changed much: keep the songwriting honest and open-hearted, keep the recording unforced but pristine, and let a group that attuned to each other do the rest. Bury the Key is their first full-length since 2020 and their first for Ghostly International. It leans into a more sinister kind of disco and puts a sharpened edge on their soft-focus sophisti-pop, going after feelings the band had locked away — the give-and-take between happiness, hedonism and self-destruction. The songs are self-produced and often narrated by invented figures, but what they draw on is observed firsthand: intimacy inside the band and outside it, toxic behaviour, drug use, and the apocalyptic dread of living through what feels like the end of an epoch.