“Sugar” by Peking Duk and Jack River

"Sugar" teams the Australian electronic duo Peking Duk with Jack River, the project of Holly Rankin, and it started on the road: Rankin opened for the duo on their 2018 Australian tour, and the three became friends. As Peking Duk tell it, the track was a sombre, gloomy sketch until she climbed aboard and turned it bright and playful.

Rankin had long pictured a song stitched together from the vocal flavor of the pop records she grew up on, so they all went back to the hits of the turn of the millennium for ideas, aiming to drag her candy-colored world into soft-drink-commercial, ice-cream-truck territory. It's a sugar rush that knows exactly what it is. It climbed to 54 on the ARIA Singles Chart and earned a Best Dance Release nomination at the 2019 ARIA Music Awards.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.