TOPS are starting over with the help of retro sci-fi

She clarifies that she feels constantly inspired to take the band further, whether it’s capturing Carriere’s guitar playing or showing off the diversity of their tracklists. While the hallmark TOPS tropes endure in their new record Bury the Key, there’s the feeling that the band are experiencing an organic rebirth. “We have a distinct sound, but a lot of people when they first listen to a whole record of ours [will] be like, ‘Wow, there’s really different songs on here’… Each song is in itself like full experimentation.”

Penny calls from Los Angeles, where she’s staying at a friend’s place while the band practices for their upcoming tour. She’s normally based in Montréal, though before Bury the Key’s conception she had a stint in Berlin. Montréal is a recurring character in the story of TOPS: the band made their break onto the city’s DIY scene back in 2012 and have been a mainstay ever since. “I feel like the only thing that’s changed in a lot of ways about the Montréal scene, or my relationship to the scene, is that now I’m like an elder, whereas at some point I was like a young upstart,” Penny explains. After years of making and performing music in the city, for Penny it still maintains “the essence of what initially drew me into being an independent artist.” She smiles and adds, “Also, there’s just the fact that it’s super cold in the winter. It’s just the best place to log hours in the studio.”

When we speak, Bury the Key has been out for a week. The band’s fifth record is still a TOPS album to its very core. Penny and Carriere began writing Bury the Key during the second half of 2023. Nearly a year of developing these ideas in the studio resulted in an identifiably TOPS album, but with a distinctly heavier edge. “There was a playfulness in the production aspect [...] kind of like a precursor to the darker elements in a way,” Penny shares. She relishes in the intricacies, intuition, and experimentation of self-production, from a late-nineties synthesizer made by Yamaha called the Motif, to her “attempt at jazz” through the flute part in “Outstanding in the Rain”.

Bury the Key follows the narrative of a love affair that isn’t necessarily a positive force. “You get struck by lightning and then you’re trying to reckon with it the whole time.” Surprised to find herself back at “square one” at this point in her life, Penny let the closing track “Paper House” encapsulate the journey of the album – you find yourself ultimately “standing in the wreckage of things and thinking about how to move on.”

Established in the early 2010s, TOPS now consists of Penny, Carriere, Marta Cikojevic, and Riley Fleck. The band have spent over a decade building a sound. It sounds like a pretty mammoth task, but it’s a process that’s given them diehard fans who adore the band’s blend of sophisti-pop influences, charming grooves, dreamy synths, and iconic melodies.

Penny released her first solo project, Surfacing, back in 2024. Her ethereal, hushed vocals shine throughout the EP, alongside her tender songwriting. Surfacing was a “learning lesson,” leading her to “appreciate how much you have to carry if you’re alone.” She was excited to reunite with her collaborators when the opportunity to work on a fifth record rolled around. Bury the Key came at the perfect time – both Cikojevic and Carriere had also finished up some of their own solo work and the band was reuniting again. “We were really able to appreciate how special the dynamic is that TOPS has,” smiles Penny.

When pressed to find a word to encapsulate TOPS, timeless comes to mind. It isn’t surprising that Penny mentions a range of influences that constitute the band’s “sophisti-pop obsession,” including Prefab Sprout, China Crisis, and New Musik. Aside from a further mix of band favourites ranging from The Pretenders and Blondie to the Bee Gees, Penny highlights her love of more “sensuous music” such as Sade or Diana Ross. She concludes that TOPS best falls into the bracket of “romantic and sensuous, but at the same time sophisticated, and maybe there’s a bit of psych somehow thrown in the mix – sophisti-psych.”

Penny credits both the band’s musicality and approach to production for their success – “there’s a musicality, but then also the world-building of the recordings.” This world-building proved especially relevant for the darker turn Bury the Key would take. The album, both musically and visually, is clearly influenced by retro sci-fi. Its pulpy album cover, designed by Robert Beatty, is a testament to this.

A trip to Mexico for a festival ultimately inspired the confident aesthetic of Bury the Key. “We went to this rock bazaar and there were people selling these patches and so much different rocker memorabilia for different metal bands, punk bands, Pink Floyd, whatever, you name it. And I just really like that aesthetic in general… This idea that there’s visual hallmarks of being more of an outside alternative thing, like the alternative section of a CD store.”

It’s a notable shift for TOPS, after their rise within the realm of mellow, soft, and certifiably ‘vibey’ music. Penny admits that going for an edgier sound “felt like something that would be funny to play with because it feels like when our band initially started it was all about how we can be soft, and we were emerging out of this noise scene… When I imagine the album, the world that it existed in was this sort of dark psychedelic universe, kind of like a moonscape situation.”

The bridges of both “Mean Streak” and “Stars Come After You” are her favourite moments on the record. She admits that she’s “not really a hit-loving person,” despite Carriere having the “pop sensibility” that launched some of TOPS’s most iconic tracks. “He wrote ‘Call You Back’, for example… I feel like every record there’s always a David song that’s always just kind of a banger… I’m not like that… I love weird things and I love bridges.”

It was Beatty that really pulled the pulpy element out of Penny’s numerous rock fandom references and imagery, resulting in album art reminiscent of “an old Stephen King cover.” Sci-fi nostalgia also became a notable theme. “Once we dressed up as Star Trek characters for Halloween,” she laughs, admitting that the band are all Trekkies deep down. For Penny, retro sci-fi is “very humanist… maybe now in our little, post–AI apocalyptic realm of existence we don’t really see sci-fi that way, but there’s a nostalgia for those visuals.”

These visuals are especially clear in the music video for “Falling on my Sword”, directed by JJ Stratford. Stratford used old analogue video, editing and shooting with equipment that she collected and archived as studios were dumping them. Analogue gear and techniques ultimately felt “true to the band” for Penny. “A boundary that I wanted to set is that I absolutely didn’t want to use AI at all. But instead just try to find as many artists that we could collaborate with and bring into our world.”

Since TOPS first started releasing music, AI has become an unsettling force in the music industry. “I’m concerned about the environment… We’ve never been in a situation where it’s more clear that we need to change the way that we’re using and producing energy… It can be so hard to feel like you have any recourse.” Delving further into AI music, Penny unpacks her scepticism surrounding “the ability for this music to find a real fandom and a real culture around it.” She goes on to add that, “I feel that people have connected with me as an artist because of my voice. And because it’s coming from my soul. Not to be, like, cheesy-metaphysical, but I truly believe that my only talent is my ability to communicate my humanness through that vehicle, which is my voice and my songs… I’m not saying you need to have a human play an instrument for [music] to communicate a soul… I want AI to do my laundry, not paint my paintings, you know?”

Despite the darker turn taken with their new album, there’s something relentlessly optimistic about TOPS’s music – Bury the Key simply marks a point of evolution. They’re a band built on nostalgia, one that celebrates both the joy and challenges of collaboration. As TOPS prepare to embark on a tour of North America and Europe throughout the autumn, Penny explains the logistics of authentically translating their music to a live stage. “Everything is always created completely live… There are a bunch of songs on the record that are pretty straight-up exactly like how we played them when we wrote them, like ‘Chlorine’ or ‘ICU2’... And then with ‘Annihilation’, you’re like, what the fuck are we going to do? The good thing is Marci’s so talented. She’s just going at the keys in that one, but we’re figuring it out.”

At its core, that’s what TOPS is – assertive, playful, and figuring out how to take their distinctive sound to new heights.