Sugar

Some songs announce their subject and some leave it in the room like a smell you can't quite name. "Sugar" belongs to the second kind. It sits in the middle of Beach Fossils' third album, Somersault, a record full of brightness, strings and friendly hooks, and it quietly turns the lights down. The tempo is easy, the guitars drift in circles, and the voice at the center sounds like it is watching its own life from a few feet away.

That distance is the song's real subject. Beneath a title that promises something sweet, "Sugar" is about craving, dependency and the strange numbness that can come with trying to get through a day.

A band stretching out

Somersault arrived on June 2, 2017, through Bayonet Records, the label Dustin Payseur started in 2015 with his wife, Katie Garcia.^[1] It was the longest gap the band had ever left between records, following 2013's Clash the Truth.^[1] The sessions were scattered across Brooklyn, Manhattan, upstate New York and Los Angeles, and Payseur co-produced with Jonathan Rado of Foxygen, who recorded to analog tape one song at a time.^[1] Strings and woodwinds were added to the usual four-piece sound.^[1]

That is a long way from the bedroom jangle that made the project's name. Beach Fossils began as Payseur's solo outlet in New York, a young North Carolina transplant making hazy, reverb-soaked guitar pop. By 2017 it was a full band, and critics noted a pull toward 1960s pop, grunge and country textures on the new record.^[7]

"Sugar" is credited to Tommy Davidson and Payseur.^[1] Davidson has said the band named the album by brainstorming a list of words, a kind of abstract word association.^[8] That collaborative, impressionistic habit helps explain why the song reads as mood first and statement second.

The timing matters too. Payseur has said the record leans on his own shortcomings and those of his friends, and that it was shaped partly by his North Carolina roots and by a political climate he felt he could not write around.^[2] In that setting, a small private song about appetite and avoidance reads as a counterweight, a moment where the world's noise drops away and only the narrator's habits remain.

The sound of keeping your distance

Reviewers who write about "Sugar" tend to reach for atmosphere. Bandcamp Daily heard a weaving bassline and a chorus guitar that circles gently, enough to suggest an outtake from a lost 4AD record.^[3] Under the Radar compared its blurry-eyed sentiment to Mac DeMarco's "My Old Man."^[4] A review at mxdwn found it mellow and straightforward, with string arrangements adding depth behind clear lead guitar lines.^[5]

None of that sounds like crisis, and that is the point. The arrangement is comfortable. It rocks you. A listener can drift along with it for three and a half minutes without once feeling alarmed.

Bandcamp's writer went a step further and observed that the hazy instrumentation supports a vocal refrain suggesting detachment and alienation.^[3] The pairing matters. When the music is soft and the singer is somewhere far from his own feelings, the effect is a kind of sedation, which is exactly what the title invites us to think about.

Craving, dependency and the quiet fix

A common reading of the album places "Sugar" alongside "Down the Line" as songs about confronting inner demons, whether that means dependency or depression.^[1] That framing fits the title. Sugar is the most ordinary of cravings, a thing we reach for to feel better for a moment and then need again. It is also a classic stand-in for stronger habits, because it is sweet, legal and easy to excuse.

The song never needs to name its vice for the idea to land. What comes through is the cycle: wanting, getting, feeling a flicker of relief, and then the return of the thing you were trying to escape. The circling guitar figure behaves the same way. It keeps coming back around to where it started.

It would be too neat to say the song is a confession about one specific substance, and nothing I found from the band says so. Payseur does not appear to have explained this track in the interviews available. What the surrounding material does give us is a writer who has become more willing to talk about low points. In a 2017 interview with The Fader, he said he used to be embarrassed to discuss his low moods, and that making music helps keep him out of the funk.^[2] Seen that way, a song about leaning on something sweet and temporary is a natural fit for the record he was making.

Loneliness and impermanence

Bandcamp Daily summed up the album as bright, playful music paired with lyrics about Payseur wrestling with loneliness and the impermanence of personal relationships.^[3] In the Fader piece he described many songs as being about friends entering or leaving his life, and said he is critical of his own shortcomings as a friend, treating friendship as seriously as romance.^[2]

"Sugar" slots into this web of concerns. Craving and loneliness are close relatives. The urge for a quick comfort often arrives right when the people who might offer a lasting one are out of reach. If you read the song's detachment as a response to that gap, the sweetness of the title starts to sound a little sad. It is what you reach for when the better thing isn't there.

This also explains why the song doesn't wallow. Payseur's persona across the album is gentle, self-critical and oddly cheerful. He isn't dramatizing his troubles. He is observing them with the mild embarrassment of someone who knows he is not the first person to get stuck here.

A skateboard video for a heavy-hearted song

The official video for "Sugar" is a good example of how the band balances tone. Made with Habitat Skateboards, it shows the members skating around New York City with an offbeat sense of humor, and the company even built a custom board with the band.^[6] It matches the earlier clips for "Saint Ivy" and "Down the Line," which means the album's heaviest songs were consistently paired with light, almost goofy visuals.^[6]

That contrast is worth sitting with. A band rolling through the city on wheels is the opposite of numbness. It is motion, friendship and play. Set against a song about dependency and distance, it suggests that the way out is not a grand gesture but a return to ordinary joy with other people around. The video does not argue this, and it would be a stretch to claim the band intended it. But the pairing is hard to ignore, and it fits the record's larger message about friendship as the thing that keeps you upright.

Where it sits on the record

Somersault earned strong reviews, with Metacritic at 81 out of 100 and The A.V. Club calling it the band's finest record yet.^[1] Some critics felt the band stayed too comfortable, and a few reviewers treated "Sugar" as one of the less showy tracks, one that doesn't stand out as much as the singles.^[5]

That undersells it. On an album with woodwind parts, a guest turn from Rachel Goswell of Slowdive and a political song written after the 2016 election, "Sugar" is the place where the record's surface smoothness is most useful.^[1] Because it asks for so little attention, it can carry the most private feeling on the album without announcing it. The track is a hinge between the outward-facing songs and the more nakedly personal "Down the Line" that follows a few tracks later.^[1]

Other ways to hear it

There is more than one way to take the title. A literal reading hears a song about indulgence and its aftermath, about a habit that is more comforting than it is good for you. A romantic reading hears sugar as a pet name, with the song tracing a relationship that has turned sweet and then faintly stale, a love whose pleasures have become routine. A third reading treats it as a portrait of emotional anesthesia, the sense of going through the motions while a pleasant sound plays over the top.

The evidence in the music favors the middle ground between the first and third. The detachment Bandcamp noticed and the album's wider interest in demons and dependency make the self-numbing reading the most supported one.^[1][3] But because the song declines to be specific, the romantic reading is never fully shut out, and that openness is part of its charm.

Why it lingers

Plenty of songs about addiction and depression are loud about it. "Sugar" is the reverse, a track that behaves like what it describes, soothing and circling and slightly out of reach. It does not tell you how to feel. It lets you notice, somewhere around the second pass of the chorus, that you have been floating for a while.

For listeners who have ever used something small and sweet to get through something large and bitter, that quiet recognition is the whole point. The song offers no cure. It offers company, which on a record so concerned with friendship may be the most honest thing it could do.