I Feel Alive

Moving to LA and holing up in a house for a year wasn’t the usual recipe for making a TOPS record. “We really laboured over it a lot,” singer and multi-instrumentalist Jane Penny tells Apple Music of 2017’s melancholic Sugar at the Gate. But things changed quite a bit for I Feel Alive, the indie-pop band's fourth LP. Back in their hometown of Montreal, with keyboardist Marta Cikojevic added to the lineup, and with their California-based drummer Riley Fleck travelling in to record, “we really had to be very focused and do a lot in a short period of time,” says Penny. “It kept everything feeling a little more vital throughout the whole process, because there was just enough pressure to make things happen quickly—or to not overthink it.” The other big change was that between albums, the group's principal songwriters, Penny and guitarist David Carriere, ended their relationship, which they’d been in since their early twenties. But that doesn’t mean I Feel Alive is a breakup record. “It's more that after a certain amount of time has passed from something like that, you actually have time to reflect on those situations and your feelings,” says Penny. The explorations of post-breakup emotions, womanhood, intimacy and the thrill of new relationships that make up I Feel Alive are nicely complemented by the silky, ’70s AM Gold sound that TOPS have been honing over the last decade. Here Penny goes deeper into the album’s themes as she deconstructs each of its songs. Direct Sunlight "I originally wrote it about somebody that's cheating on someone else, but then I thought it was too negative. There's a certain sourness in some types of songs that, when you write them, especially when you change the way you feel in a lot of situations, it makes you want to change the sentiment of the song. But this idea of 'You play shadow games/I play with the light,’ it's that people can be kind of dark, or that there's some kind of darkness—and playing music is a way of recuperating all of th