You take the call late at night
You don’t need to ask if it’s alright.
There are nights in Los Angeles when the air feels lacquered with temptation, when neon hums with the same disquiet as an anxious heart. NYIKO’s new single, Sugar, released September 19th via Trailing Twelve, seems born of such hours. It thrums with a modernist ache, somewhere between Mareux’s cold elegance and Provoker’s razor-edged intimacy. Still, it carries a languor all its own: angular guitars tracing wounds, synths swelling like sirens across a dim boulevard, bass lines muscular yet strangely resigned.
The track glows and struts, synths pulsing in sync with a heart unwilling to yield, guitars cutting diagonals through the haze. It is a dance song for those who can’t quite surrender to dancing, a feverish hymn for the terminally unsatisfied.
The lyric teeters on surrender, sweetness that curdles with each taste. “To me, Sugar is about temptation and control,” NYIKO confesses. “It’s what happens when lust overrides logic – when something looks sweet on the surface but rots you from the inside,” One hears in his delivery the velvet threat of desire tipping into delirium. Temptation is the fruit, candied and polished, yet already rotting at the core.
The accompanying video, directed by Peter Donaghy, brings this parable to flesh and performance. Tempting figures circle our protagonist like doomed constellations: magnetic, yet unable to close the gulf between them. Their orbit unfolds inside a theatre of want: pole dancers, bathed in strobing light, gesture their routines with professional precision. They are supposed to entice, yet the camera lingers on the vacant glaze in their eyes, on the way the dancers become wallpaper, ornament, static. Vice has curdled into monotony, sex becomes another currency drained of its charge. The viewer is left stranded in the hollow luxury of an endless party, Gatsby’s ballroom after dawn.
This shimmering façade that conceals nothing but ash, the gold that turns to dust in your hand. NYIKO’s Sugar stages that old American promise, that indulgence can soothe the sou,l and exposes it as counterfeit. The video’s dancers, no longer sirens, become symbols of exhausted ritual. Desire, monetized and looped on stage, collapses into its own redundancy.
In Sugar, pleasure is performance, intimacy is transaction, and desire is both feast and famine. NYIKO makes the glitter gleam, only to show us the void beneath. And still, like moths drunk on the porch light, we cannot look away.
Watch below:
NYIKO (“nee-koh”) is a Los Angeles–based singer, songwriter, producer, label owner, and visual artist who fuses synth-pop, post-punk, and new wave into songs that shimmer with sophistication yet pulse with raw emotional depth. Raised in a small New Hampshire town, he first unearthed inspiration digging through dollar-bin records and later refined his instincts as a college radio DJ in Vermont, where his fascination with overlooked sounds began to coalesce.
Since relocating to Los Angeles in 2015, NYIKO has sculpted music that is polished but never hollow, addressing themes of mental health, identity, dating, and self-love with candor. His pop sensibility is immediate, but beneath the surface lies a deeper current of nostalgia, like a half-remembered dream on a late-night drive. For NYIKO, accessibility is a way to transform private fractures into shared catharsis.
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