It’s been a banner year for Hollywood needle drops: “Whole Lotta Love” in F1; “Forever Young,” “Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” “I Have the Touch,” and “The Order of Death” in Marty Supreme; “Beware of Darkness” in Weapons; “Dirty Work” in One Battle After Another; “In Spite of Ourselves” in Die My Love; “Come On Up to the House” in Wake Up Dead Man. Google “best movie needle drops 2025” and the consensus on almost all of these songs is unanimously positive. And don’t get me wrong, I dig them all, but the needle drop that’s stuck with me most has yet to make its way onto a single list this winter. I blame Katy Perry for the wide-scale omission.
Well, it’s not actually Perry’s fault that the use of her song “Firework” in Eddington, Ari Aster’s pandemic-era neo-western, has gotten a great deal of attention from list-makers this season. And, like, I get it. At a masked-up backyard fundraiser event in a listless New Mexico town, Joe the sheriff (Joaquin Phoenix) confronts the local mayor, Ted (Pedro Pascal). Joe asks Ted to turn the music down, so Ted turns “Firework” up. Their macho-wacho charade turns into a skirmish while that perfect Teenage Dream hit perks and pops over the violence. Aster, a patriarch of the perverse, once used “Always Be My Baby” to soundtrack Beau is Afraid’s Oedipal sexual climax. Music in his stories is powerful, uncomfortable. When Joe’s cyst of willful ignorance begins to harden in Eddington, it’s a slap from Ted that tears open the blister. Hearing “Firework” echoing through the sheriff’s nadir and escalating lunacy is a neat trick, one that’s impossible to forget.
But much earlier in Eddington—in the film’s uneasy, bad-omen, CDC-mandated beginning—an even greater song appears: TOPS’ “I Feel Alive,” a mostly-forgotten relic of COVID-19’s death knell on spring 2020 indie releases. I Feel Alive came out in April of that year, and its titular lead single dropped three months prior, just two days after the first lab-confirmed case of COVID-19 in the United States. Not all records got diluted by the monotony of lockdown; Fiona Apple’s Fetch the Bolt Cutters came out two weeks after I Feel Alive and swept most year-end lists come December. But I Feel Alive, this particularly sophisticated, spanky dosage of straightforwardly rapturous music, fell by the wayside after amassing respectable marks from critics across the board. The title track, bright and megawatt as it may be, just wasn’t wistful enough to shake away the quarantine scaries—and it got culturally binned for five years until Aster resurrected it in Eddington.
The small town of Eddington itself feels is straight out of a Bogdanovich flick, which makes the feel-good, metro-pop revivalism of TOPS even more displaced, the torched vitality of “I Feel Alive” contrasting sharply with the movie’s sleepy, tumbleweed pastoral. The scene in question is perfectly laughable, if not a bit uncanny—engulfed as it is in slant dialogue and the horrific vibes of early-COVID precautions. Ted doesn’t want to lower his mask to talk to an asthmatic Joe, despite a barfront window separating them. The scene is lit with elegance; a curtain of beer lamps decorates Joe’s reflection. An unmasked and incoherent vagrant, Lodge (Eddington’s living, coughing embodiment of COVID and the political separations it fostered), bangs and kicks at the bar’s locked door while an unauthorized council meeting about “infrastructure for a real future” takes place inside. When Lodge finally breaks his way in, the pop song spilling out of the corner jukebox bursts. A struggle between Joe and Lodge ensues, and Lodge retches onto Joe’s face while “when I’m in your arms, I can finally surrender” melts into him and us. Every character falls silent. Jane Penny’s voice fills up the picture. It’s all so miserably perfect. And, if you look elsewhere for just 30 seconds, it’ll all be gone.
Checking my Apple Music Replay from 2020, “I Feel Alive” is one of a handful of songs that I’ve kept in rotation throughout the half-decade since (if A24 ever decides to sync anything from Vundabar’s Either Light in one of its movies, that will ruin me). It’s one of those “last ticket out of hell”-type songs—an aching but sincere reminder of bad times that hadn’t yet calcified into total awfulness. Maybe it’s TOPS’ ceaseless brand of optimism, which pokes through even when Penny and her bandmates harmonize about the nightmares of lifeless casual sex, infidelity, or surrendering to new, strange shades of nostalgia. Maybe it’s Eddington’s presentation of the torturous early stages of madness before it crosses the threshold of no-return, which is made exceptionally frightening in Joe and Ted’s inaugural standoff. Maybe it’s both. Is “I Feel Alive” meant to be commentary, juxtaposition, comedic relief—all of the above? Or perhaps those blurred lines are themselves the point: when those two tones of impotence switch on in the bar quarrel of Aster’s spaghetti-less nightmare, what’s left to soothe us is the full tilt of TOPS’ splashy, retro vibrance.
I waited to watch Eddington until it came to streaming, because movie theaters get more and more difficult to reach the sicker and older I become. Sometimes I do regret not seeing a film on the big screen (Sorry, Baby this year, especially), but I didn’t feel that way with Eddington—because when “I Feel Alive” came within earshot for the first time, I howled so loud the dog-walkers on Hillhurst could hear me. Aster’s perversions, found homoerotically in Eddington’s subtext, go full blast when Joe furiously ogles at a cocksure Ted from outside the bar window. “I can’t understand you,” he tells Ted, referring to the mayor’s white N-95. “I feel alive, looking in your eyes,” Jane Penny sings right after. It’s a needle drop that deserves all the love showered upon its Marty Supreme and One Battle After Another peers.
TOPS is a great band, one of the best Canadian exports still around (even though the band is scattered across multiple countries now). As far as my personal streaming numbers are concerned, Penny, David Carriere, Riley Fleck, and Marta Cikojevic (who performs solo as Marci) all have their jerseys hanging in the rafters. They put out a very fun album this year, but I Feel Alive is the banger I keep coming back to—danceable sadness touted by Penny’s hot-dime pop snarl. I suppose that, at the time, COVID-19-era music needed fangs in order to still land once the masks came off. “I Feel Alive” is adultery set to glassy guitar moves and white disco pomp, but never does it go numb. So, what gives? Aster thinks “we haven’t metabolized what happened in 2020,” that “we’re still living it,” even though we’re out of lockdown: “But whatever process began there, we’re still in it.” If he’s right, then maybe “I Feel Alive” hasn’t been forgotten just yet. Maybe Eddington‘s vacuum of existential terror is the conduit for us to cherish the song once our processing is complete, if it ever can be. I hope so, because that chorus still sounds humungous in 2025. Penny’s expressions remain satisfying, timbral exorcisms.
Matt Mitchell is Paste‘s editor, reporting from their home in Los Angeles.
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