The witching hour, traditionally, is the point of the night where virtually everybody is asleep and where strange, supernatural events can quietly happen right under everyone’s nose. It’s the time of night when, if you do happen to be awake, the world takes on a certain hazy unreality. Roald Dahl in The BFG: “The witching hour, somebody had once whispered to her, was a special moment in the middle of the night when every child and every grown-up was in a deep deep sleep, and all the dark things came out from hiding and had the world all to themselves.”

“Witching Hour,” the new song from the dreamy Montreal pop group TOPS, is an elliptical story about a woman feeling a vague and difficult-to-place sense of unease and displacement in a relationship: “Don’t remember what i’m running from/ Twenty years into millennium/ Had a dream, tomorrow come/ You weren’t in it.” The song sparkles and twinkles the way TOPS songs often do, but it also feels just slightly off-kilter, as if unreality is starting to invade.

TOPS, now a quartet after the addition of keyboardist Marta Cikojevic, are getting ready to follow up 2017’s Sugar At The Gate with the new LP I Feel Alive. We’ve already posted the album’s title track. Today, TOPS have followed it up with “Witching Hour.” Check the song out below.

I Feel Alive is out 4/3 via Musique TOPS. Pre-order it here.