Picture You Staring

TOPS came together in Montreal in 2011, after the synth-pop band Silly Kissers broke up. Jane Penny and David Carriere, childhood friends from Edmonton, met the drummer Riley Fleck at the loft where they rehearsed. Their second album, Picture You Staring, came out on Arbutus, the label that released Grimes’s first records, on 2 September 2014. The title is a line from the opening song, “Way to Be Loved”, about picturing someone staring out of a window while the nights go by. Arbutus sold the band as “a raw punk take on AM studio pop”, and this record tests how far that idea can go.

They made it themselves. According to the label, the band wrote, recorded and produced it at the Arbutus studio over about a year. As Alt Citizen described it that autumn, the studio was a small former storage room off the side of the label’s office, in an old jute factory in Montreal, and most of the gear in it had been left behind by the label’s founder, Sebastian Cowan, or by friends. The band cleaned the room up and used what was there. Carriere played guitar and bass and did the programming, Penny sang and played keyboards and flute, and Fleck played drums. Maddy Glowicki, then the newest member, sang backing vocals on three songs. Penny has said the lyrics often weren’t settled until the vocals were recorded. Jacob Portrait of Unknown Mortal Orchestra mixed the album, and Penny first heard the final mix in Brooklyn in May 2014.

“Outside” shows how that worked. The band said it started while they were messing around with “One Wish”, a demo by Phil Lynott, and turned into something else: a song about guilt, the loneliness of not knowing and finding the strength to do what you want anyway. Critics heard other songs in it. AllMusic and The Line of Best Fit pointed to Berlin’s “Take My Breath Away”, while Pitchfork and The 405 heard Angelo Badalamenti’s music for Twin Peaks. For the video, Penny wanted something that caught the feelings of isolation on the record, so it is just her, dancing alone in a room.

Sleep keeps coming up, as The 405 noticed, and two titles, “All the People Sleep” and “Sleeptalker”, say so outright. “Sleeptalker”, the B-side of the lead single “Change of Heart”, is the song Penny called deeply personal: she wrote it when she felt trapped by music, about dark thoughts and the things people do to get through the night. Pitchfork picked out its fingerpicked Danelectro guitar. “Easier Said” is the longest track, at 5:03, and the album ends on “Driverless Passenger” and “Destination”, which The Line of Best Fit called the darkest and most introspective songs on it. Jessica Dean Harrison, who painted the cover, also painted a big party scene with TOPS playing in the corner, and for the “Way to Be Loved” video the band recreated it in the Arbutus office with friends, Mac DeMarco and Cadence Weapon among them.

The reviews were warm. Metacritic’s average was 80, Dummy made it album of the week and Gorilla vs. Bear ranked it fourth of 2014. The doubts were about range. Pitchfork, which gave it 7.0, noted that every song used the same sparse set of instruments and suggested that enjoying it comes down to your appetite for repetition. Exclaim! found it a little same-y, DIY thought the slower songs in the middle dragged, and both Dummy and AllMusic noted how far Penny’s voice sinks into the blurry recording. Dummy put the hard-to-hear lyrics down to the technical and money limits of the sessions.

That is the trade-off, and it decides the record. One room, one small kit and a year of work gave TOPS an album that holds together, with songs like “Outside” and “Way to Be Loved” that critics kept coming back to. The same choices are why critics found it samey, and why the words of a band that rewrites them up to the vocal take are so hard to make out. Picture You Staring is easier to like in pieces than as a whole. Arbutus still called it a cornerstone of its catalogue when it reissued it as a deluxe tenth-anniversary LP in 2024.