Sugar Relics Put Can’t Stay Awake Back in Play on Caught in the Middle
Sugar Relics Put Can't Stay Awake Back in Play on Caught in the Middle
A 2022 Dark Electro-Pop Single, Returned to Service on a 2026 Album
The synth line on Can’t Stay Awake arrives before anything else does. It is dry, close in feel, and it stays put for three and a half minutes while everything else moves around it. Sugar Relics released the track on 9 February 2022. In August 2026 it turned up again, this time on the album CAUGHT IN THE MIDDLE.
Sugar Relics’ music sits in the playlist below, and this desk’s coverage of the duo collects on the Sugar Relics profile. Can’t Stay Awake reached this desk through PopHits.Co Music Charts, which verifies independent artists and places their releases across its network of music news titles. Press play, then read on.
The Duo, the Machines, and the Voice on Top of Them
Sugar Relics are a duo based in Los Angeles. The project is the work of Laura Serafine, a singer and songwriter originally from San Antonio who has lived in LA for around fifteen years. The vocal is the part of the arrangement everything else serves.
That ordering is audible in the production. The instrumental keeps its palette small. A programmed pulse holds the floor. A filtered pad sits behind it. Meanwhile the top end stays mostly empty, so the vocal has room. There is no wall of layered synths here, which is the easy move in electro-pop and the one this record declines.
The Reference Points Are the Duo’s Own
Tape Ranger, adding the track to its indie pop playlist in March 2022, described the vocal work sitting over an eerie and well-produced instrumental. That is, in fact, a fair summary of the balance.
The duo name their own reference points, and they are the useful ones. Phantogram, The Postal Service, St. Vincent and Purity Ring all appear in their own description of the project.
Those acts share one trait. The machine parts stay legible. You can hear which sound is doing what, and nothing hides inside a wash. Can’t Stay Awake works the same way, and that is why a three and a half minute track survives repeat listening.
What the Song Is About, and Why the Sugar Relics Album Reset Matters
The subject is depression, and specifically the pull toward sleeping the day away. European Indie Music Network, covering the single on release, described it as placing that drive to sleep away the day as a villain personified.
That framing explains the arrangement choice. A song about exhaustion buried in reverb would simply sound tired. Instead the production stays alert and slightly cold. The tension between the subject and the treatment is the point.
Notably, the lyric does not resolve the argument. It sits inside it. That is harder to sequence on an album than a track which lands somewhere, so its placement on CAUGHT IN THE MIDDLE is worth noting.
A 2022 single reappearing on a 2026 album is not unusual for an independent act. It is rarely accidental, though. The track already carried coverage from European Indie Music Network, FV Music Blog, Punk Head, Rising Artists Blog and The Other Side Reviews across 2022. Bringing it onto the album means the record inherits that history rather than starting from zero.
Adjacent Acts, and Where to Hear Sugar Relics
There is a second reason the reset makes sense. An earlier Sugar Relics release, the EP White Flags, established the duo’s palette before this single sharpened it. Hearing Can’t Stay Awake inside a full length rather than as a standalone gives that development somewhere to land. A single is a snapshot. An album is an argument, and this track now sits inside one.
ElectroPop.News curator team: “The restraint is the tell. Most electro-pop about tiredness reaches for washes and reverb, and ends up sounding like the thing it describes. This one keeps the sequencer crisp and lets the discomfort come from the gap between how alert the track sounds and what the words admit.”
Listeners who came to Purity Ring for programmed parts that stay percussive rather than dissolving will find the same discipline here. Phantogram fans will recognise a strong lead vocal set against a deliberately narrow instrumental bed. Those arriving from the Postal Service will hear the older half of the lineage, which is a pop song assembled from parts you can still count.
You can hear Can’t Stay Awake on Spotify, watch it on YouTube, and follow Sugar Relics on Instagram, Facebook, X and TikTok.
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