Freewheeling indie rockers Sugadaisy are firmly situated in the pantheon of anything-goes American DIY bands—think Modest Mouse’s rustic melodicism, the lovely folk-rock bursts of Fruit Bats, of Montreal’s zonked-out psych-pop odysseys, the beery anthemic feel of Deer Tick, and much more. Across several constantly surprising EPs and full-lengths, the songwriting duo of Zac Littleton and Johny Lovan have established Sugadaisy as a musical entity that’s delightfully impossible to pin down, a quality that undoubtedly extends to their chewy gewgaw of a new single, “Girlfriend.” With much more music on the way, this is Sugadaisy’s moment—and they’re more than up for the challenge.

The roots of Sugadaisy run deep; Littleton and Lovan have known each other since grade school and started making music together in earnest back in 2015, amidst the fertile music community of Bowling Green, Kentucky. “The music scene in Bowling Green is pretty tight,” Lovan explains, referencing local forebears like Cage the Elephant and Morning Teleportation. “A lot of gold came out of that scene, and whenever we were getting involved in it, it inspired me a lot to try to do something unique and different to draw from.”

“Everyone knows each other, and we found each other through a love of recording music and believing each in each other’s songs,” he continues while discussing how he and Littleton eventually found each other as musical partners. They quickly bonded over a mutual appreciation of classic rock and Southern indie-pop scion Kevin Barnes’ constantly shapeshifting work as of Montreal, setting out to make music together that was similarly indefinable in terms of genre and style.

Since the release of 2017’s Hello, Goodbye EP, the songs have flowed from these guys endlessly and seemingly effortlessly—a byproduct of their constant in-studio prolificacy as well as a natural compulsion to create, which has driven their rapid rate of artistic progression. “Personally, I don’t feel like I’m doing much with my life unless I’m writing music,” Littleton says while talking about the band’s creative approach. “If I haven’t done that in a while, I ain’t doing well, so that’s a necessity for me. It makes everything feel better.”

Littleton describes his lyrical approach as a method of working backwards from clarity, nestling sentiments in fascinating obfuscatory phrases not dissimilarly to Sugadaisy’s own sonic slipperiness: “I start by saying the most profound thing, and then end by making sure that everyone knows I don’t know what I’m talking about,” he says with a laugh.

The band’s 2021 dual LPs Corporate Strawberry and Corpoate Coconut are more than representative of this genre-agnostic approach; witness the rubbery rap-meets-indie of “Power,” which zeroes in on Littleton’s own love of hip-hop production. And Sugadaisy have been bringing their music’s singular energy to live audiences across the country since, honing their stagecraft with like-minded acts such as the Heavy Heavy, Deer Tick, Rayland Baxter, Andy Frasco & the U.N., and St. Paul & The Broken Bones, as well as upcoming support dates for Bendigo Fletcher and appearances at SXSW and AMERICANAFEST.

As Lovan tells it, the Corporate Fallout EP from the following year represented Sugadaisy’s twin braintrust coming together to meld their songwriting approaches into one—and their latest single, the just-released “Girlfriend,” is another left turn that’s as reminiscent of psych-pop legends MGMT as it is Sugadaisy’s own Southern-fried songwriting style.

“We’d exhausted the weird bone in our body and were coming to the conclusion that we’re incapable of writing pop music,” Littleton reflects while discussing the song’s creative bent. “We figured that if we just wrote the most painfully poppy thing that we could without making ourselves vomit, it’d still be weird enough to be considered cool. We were just trying to write a pop song as hard as we could, and I think it turned out to be pretty dope.”

What’s next? An EP coming in the spring of 2025, as well as a brand spanking new full-length to arrive later that year—proof that, when it comes to cranking out the tunes, Sugadaisy are just getting started. “Our mission has always been to prioritize time to get together and just spit out songs and take it from there,” Lovan says while discussing what the future holds for Sugadaisy, “That’s how it’s always played in my head when it comes to conceptualizing what ends up being our collections of music that we release.” And if what they’ve accomplished thus far is any indication, there’s no sense in changing up Sugadaisy’s winning approach any time soon.