From Drake to Cohen, melancholy and entertainment have always been freely combinable ingredients in the melting pot of Canadian pop culture. Attribute it to the oscillation between cold winters and mild summers if you will (leave it to meteorotropy to expose hidden tenderness); in any case, Canadians seems to be ones to dress heartache in a flashy suit. It’s no accident, then (at least as far as this bold theory goes) that the first edition of Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being was published in Canada. A protagonist in the maple-leaf practice of generous mood vacillation is the Montreal-based label Arbutus, the people responsible for bringing us Grimes, Majical Cloudz, Sean Nicholas Savage, and now TOPS. TOPS, made up of three, sometimes four musicians, make pop music. The twelve bulls-eye hits on their debut album Picture You Staring left zero room, or desire, for filler material. With the help of Juno synthesizers and Danelectro guitars, TOPS connect the coordinates of Take My Breath Away, Fleetwood Mac, and Twin Peaks, and inundate the entire topography in sugar-sweet melancholy. In June there will be a new album. Though we musn’t assume, we sincerely hope they’ll deem us privy to some of their new tunes.

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