Merritt returns with a beautifully sung meditation on love, work and the sweetness hidden in ordinary lives.
After almost a decade away from releasing new albums, Tift Merritt returns with a collection of songs that feels both intimate and expansive. What has remained is Merrit’s timeless approach to music: her work feels like it could have been released in any of the last six decades; songs are cleverly crafted with instrumentation used to help frame Merrit’s voice, which remains full of beauty, clarity and power. Thematically, Sugar looks for meaning in the quieter places of life: conversations, acts of care, domestic labour, memory, kindness and the difficulty of remaining open-hearted in a world that often rewards the opposite. Across eleven songs, Merritt repeatedly returns to the idea that what sustains us is rarely what attracts the most attention.
That concern is established immediately on Finest Feelings, one of several songs that treats love less as romance than as an act of emotional honesty. The repeated plea, “Will you tell the truth, are you strong enough to do the gritty work of love?” becomes a kind of mission statement. The up-tempo musical start is also rousing. The song showcases how Merrit’s voice will be in the spotlight: there are some great backing parts here, including a lovely bass line, but they never distract from the vocals.
Those same ideas reappear throughout the record. Look What Love Just Did explores love’s capacity to transform ordinary life, balancing joy and heartbreak without ever settling fully into either. The beautiful line “Touched the root just to know the flower” captures the song’s fascination with what lies beneath appearances. Meanwhile, Someone to Watch the Band With Me turns loneliness into something surprisingly modest and therefore all the more affecting. In a world where “any old thing I want gets delivered to my door”, the singer is not looking for salvation, merely companionship. Merrit’s voice feels at its most confessional here. There’s a plaintive note which is affecting and enhanced by the swells of the music.
The album’s emotional centre might be Generous, a quietly devastating account of abandonment. The song begins with just voice and acoustic guitar, and the simplicity of the song adds to its power. Merritt avoids bitterness even while documenting the pain of being erased from somebody else’s story. “Man enough to be my lover, but not my friend” hits with some force, while the repeated refrain “You just forget my heart was generous” captures the song’s deepest wound. The loss itself matters, but so does the fear that the love once given will be forgotten.
Yet this is not simply a record about relationships. Again and again Merritt widens her gaze towards community, resilience and the unnoticed people whose labour sustains the world. Everyday Singing may be the album’s clearest expression of this. Against a backdrop of bombs, divorce and uncertainty, Merritt places her faith in “poets and revolutionaries” and “the everyday singing of mothers and daughters”. Towards the end of the song what sounds like a school choir adds their voices to the song, which feels like a powerful way of expressing that innocence can be a forceful antidote to despair.
That same celebration of overlooked lives reaches its fullest expression on Fate of Man is Sarah’s Eyes, an a cappella song with Merrit cleverly providing her own backing to great effect. The music also helps to build the song, which is based around the repeated assertion that “What keeps the world going? A washerwoman”. The song elevates domestic labour into something almost sacred. Merritt’s writing is at its most striking here. “What’s she press and fold but time” and “God goes one bed sheet at a time” transform everyday work into a form of quiet stewardship.
Several songs explore what lies beneath the visible surface of things. Locks presents songwriting itself as an attempt at connection, “I’m trying to sing all the locks off your heart”. Whereas, title song Sugar, one of the album’s defining statements and musical highlights, rejects performance for its own sake. “The spotlight is a racket, it isn’t what it seems”, Merritt sings, before declaring her commitment to finding “all the sugar in the places in between”. The phrase feels central to the entire record. Again and again these songs seek out hidden sweetness, overlooked beauty and moments of grace. The song radiates love and hope. The music rises and falls, and rises again, creating a blend of reflective and anthemic moments: a song to lift you up.
The album’s most explicitly political moment arrives with Last Ditch Ultimatum, a witty and unexpectedly sharp piece of social commentary performed at a lower tempo. Imagining heaven temporarily closed, Merritt offers a simple condition for entry, “Until everybody’s going, nobody’s getting in.” The song’s humour never disguises its seriousness. Beneath the playful premise lies a plea for compassion, inclusion and a rejection of the urge to divide people into deserving and undeserving categories. Elsewhere, Mad, Mad World examines exclusion from a more personal angle. Using the memory of a former institution for society’s unwanted people, Merritt explores how easily communities define themselves by who they cast aside.
There are pieces of philosophy too. Library of Dust imagines nature as a vast archive where every life leaves a trace, while Philosopher’s Song follows rivers, seasons and changing landscapes in search of wisdom. Neither song offers definitive answers. Instead, both arrive at a kind of humble wonder. The repeated search for “any kindness I can find” on the closing track feels significant. After all the album’s reflections on love, loneliness, memory, faith and belonging, kindness emerges as the closest thing Merritt has to a conclusion.
Many albums attempt to find hope amid difficult times. What distinguishes this one is how modest that hope remains and the beauty with which it is sung. Merritt does not promise redemption or certainty. Instead, she finds grace in conversation, companionship, songs, laundry, memory and small acts of care. In a culture often drawn towards spectacle, she remains fascinated by the sugar in the spaces in between. It is a perspective that feels both deeply humane and quietly radical.
