Sugar at the Gate

For their third album, TOPS left Montreal. Jane Penny, David Carriere and Riley Fleck spent all of 2016 living in a house in Glendale, on the edge of Los Angeles, that their label described as a mini-mansion and former brothel and that went by the name Glamdale. Sugar at the Gate came out on Arbutus on 2 June 2017, nearly three years after Picture You Staring. One more fact frames it. Penny and Carriere, a couple since their early twenties, split up around the time they finished it. “The record was completely finished months before we actually broke up,” Penny said.

The move was partly practical. Fleck is American, his work visa had run out, and the band wanted a house with a garage, something Montreal, a city of apartments and jam spaces, couldn’t give them. Fleck found the place, and Penny remembered satin wallpaper and silver and gold paint everywhere. They recorded it themselves, in the garage or in a studio room they built in the house, and the liner notes also list Drones Club in Montreal. During the sessions Penny learned to drive in the parking lot of Forest Lawn cemetery. “Living in LA was living out a teenage fantasy,” she said. As on every TOPS record, the band produced it. The outside ear was Chris Coady, who had produced Beach House’s Teen Dream and Bloom, and who mixed it; Penny said TOPS would rather bring experts in at that stage than on the creative side.

They came to it changed. In 2015 they had played about 100 shows, and Penny said that changed her singing and taught the band what it could do. She and Carriere also wanted to act more like producers: for “Cloudy Skies” and “Topless” they listened to a lot of ’90s R&B instrumentals, looking for space and minimalism outside the genres people expected from them. “Dayglow Bimbo” grew from a Carriere guitar line that made the band think of Sonic Youth or My Bloody Valentine, and Penny called it the heaviest track they had made. “I Just Wanna Make You Real” had a jazzier feel, so it got a flute solo at the end. Jackson MacIntosh, the band’s new bassist, plays bass on “Petals” and “Marigold & Gray” and guitar on “Seconds Erase”, and Romy Lightman of Tasseomancy and Caila Thompson-Hannant, now Cecile Believe, sing backing vocals.

Penny and Carriere wrote the words both together and apart. “Further” started as a Carriere song, and Penny rewrote most of the lyrics when she came to sing it; she later said songs like it are about realising you’re in a situation that isn’t working for you. She credits “Hours Between” to Carriere. “Petals”, the lead single, is about Los Angeles and what people there are chasing, with a line about someone trying to become a star. Penny directed its video in the Glendale house, on 35mm film, with impersonators of Prince, Madonna, Michael Jackson and Dolly Parton. The label said the title points to orgasm, carrot chasing, gatekeeping and the social contract. Penny pictured the gate at Mr. Burns’s mansion with a pile of sugar behind it.

Metacritic’s average, 70, came in lower than for Picture You Staring, but Gorilla vs. Bear ranked it third of 2017. Exclaim! gave it 8/10 for its restraint and its use of space. Pitchfork, at 7.4, praised the band’s consistency over three records but found the songs hard to tell apart and the lyrics forgettable. AllMusic heard a breakup album, a little heavier in mood than its predecessor. DIY and God Is in the TV wanted more punch, and Mojo, at two stars, found it largely insubstantial.

The averages undersell it. This is Picture You Staring with the limits taken off: more room, a band toughened by a year of shows, clearer ideas about production and a mixer from outside, and Exclaim! noted Penny’s voice sitting close to the front of the mix, where on Picture You Staring critics had struggled to make it out. The sweetness in the title is real, but the songs keep something behind the gate: a breakup the songs never spell out, a city full of people chasing fame, a heavy guitar song that Penny calls a wink. It is a better record than Picture You Staring. Three years later TOPS made I Feel Alive back in Montreal and in Berlin, produced it themselves again and gave the mix to Coady again.