Listen up! Tift Merritt’s Sugar Is the Warmest Kind of Homecoming [review]

Nine years is a long time to wait, but Tift Merritt has never been an artist who rushes. Sugar, out today on One Riot Records, is her first album since 2017’s Stitch of the World — and it arrives not as a tentative comeback but as the sound of a singer-songwriter walking back into a room she never really left, lighting it up all over again.

For those who’ve followed Merritt since Bramble Rose and Tambourine, the absence has been felt. In the interim she’s lived a remarkably full life off the stage: raising her daughter, serving as a practitioner-in-residence at Duke University, restoring a vintage Raleigh motel called The Gables into an arts haven, and advocating for musicians’ rights through the Artist Rights Alliance. That time away didn’t drain her well — it deepened it. Sugar was written across roughly eight years of lived experience, and you can hear every one of them in the album’s unguarded country-soul.

Working with producer Lawrence Rothman (Margo Price, Amanda Shires), Merritt recorded the album live at Nashville’s Gold Pacific Studios, and that decision pays off in spades. Many tracks were first takes — Tift on the floor, cutting with the band — and the result has a deliberate spontaneity, a looseness that feels like eavesdropping on something real. She’s joined by a stellar cast including guitarist Audley Freed, multi-instrumentalist Robert Ellis, Dr. Dog’s Eric Slick, and Midlake’s McKenzie Smith, but the arrangements never crowd her. They simply hold the songs up to the light.

Lead single “Finest Feelings” is the perfect doorway in: raw, hopeful, fearful, and bursting with the urgency of love. Merritt has described it as a song that just “spilled out,” and it shows — there’s nothing labored here, only the longing to be fully known. It sets the tone for a record Merritt calls a meditation on “the surprising sweetness of being unequipped for showing up every day but trying anyway.” That’s the throughline of Sugar: it relishes pleasure, finds love and loses it, and laughs at how life shakes our plans out of our hands, usually for the better.

What makes this album land so squarely is its refusal to wallow. Merritt has spoken about wanting to put some love out into a heavy world, treating that as her responsibility as an artist while still making room for joy. Sugar is both bracingly real and genuinely ebullient — tender and tough-minded in equal measure, exactly what longtime listeners hope for from her, and maybe a touch more joyful than we had any right to expect.

After nearly a decade, Sugar doesn’t feel like a return so much as a continuation — one rooted in growth, resilience, and the enduring power of connection. For an artist long regarded as one of Americana’s most vital voices, it’s a reminder of precisely why we missed her. Welcome back, Tift. The sweet tooth was worth it.

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