Melbourne soul and funk veterans The Bamboos have announced their 12th studio album, ‘Sugar On Top’, due November 6 through bandleader Lance Ferguson’s Pacific Theatre label. They have also released the album’s title track, a breezy slice of boogie featuring longtime vocalist Kylie Auldist.
‘Sugar On Top’ follows recent single ‘Rockets & Flowers’, which has already found an international audience with support from KEXP in Seattle, BBC 6 Music in the UK, ABC radio in Australia and Switzerland’s RSI National Radio. Together, the two tracks offer the first glimpse of where The Bamboos are heading more than two decades into their career.
The new single sits comfortably in the band’s soul-funk wheelhouse, riding a mid-tempo groove punctuated by cowbell and a horn section that arrives just as the chorus opens up. Its accompanying video, directed by Rick Clifford, leans into a deliberately retro Betamax aesthetic. It is an appropriate visual match for a band that has always known how to draw from the past without simply treating soul and funk as museum pieces.
For ‘Sugar On Top’, Ferguson once again worked with longtime co-producer and engineer John Castle, whose credits include Alex Lahey, Vance Joy, Angus & Julia Stone, Jack River and Cub Sport. This time, however, recording shifted away from Melbourne to Castle’s home studio in Launceston, Tasmania, giving a familiar creative partnership a new setting.
The ten-track album will feature several guest vocalists alongside Auldist, with Ferguson drawing entirely from The Bamboos’ extended circle of friends and collaborators. It continues a career that has seen the group become one of the enduring fixtures of Australian soul and funk while developing an audience well beyond home.
There is also a curious second life unfolding for the band’s back catalogue. Their 2006 track ‘I Don’t Wanna Stop’ unexpectedly exploded across social media in late 2025 and has since accumulated more than one billion plays on TikTok. Rather than being attached to one particular viral trend, the song has travelled through videos from users across countries and languages, introducing a 20-year-old Bamboos track to an entirely new audience.
That resurgence continued earlier this year when Cosmo’s Midnight remixed ‘I Don’t Wanna Stop’, but The Bamboos are not relying on nostalgia to carry them forward. With ‘Rockets & Flowers’ and now ‘Sugar On Top’, album number 12 finds the band firmly back in motion, with November bringing the next chapter of a catalogue that is unexpectedly finding new listeners at both ends.
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