The group will also release new music in 2018

Jennifer Nettles and Kristian Bush are working on new music together and are plotting a 2018 tour as Sugarland. While we reported last month that Sugarland was working on new music, the duo made the tour announcement on Tuesday’s (Dec 5th) edition of The Bobby Bones Show, where they also performed “All I Want To Do” and “Baby Girl.”

“New music is happening very soon. It is a thing,” Nettles tells Bones. “We’re going on tour, guys, 2018. Yes, we are. There’s going to be new music and new live shows.”

The album and tour news come following the group’s surprise reunion last month at the 51st Annual CMA Awards when they presented Duo of the Year during the ceremony, hinting at a return. After the show, the duo surprised guests at the Big Machine Label Group (BMLG) after party by performing “Baby Girl” and “Stay.” Bones inquired about the secrecy of the reunion in which Bush says, “There’s a secret tunnel underneath [the Bridgestone Arena] that I didn’t know about.”

Nettles interjected, “It was like extreme lockdown. Like no rehearsals for the copy the day before for any of the script the day before. Nothing was mentioned anywhere. We didn’t show up for any of it. Nobody was able to say it. We like drove up right before we walked on stage, got out of the car, literally in the secret tunnel that I also did not know existed, and then walked back off and back into the car and away we went.”

Nettles and Bush never officially broke up, but decided to pursue solo careers in 2011, after a devastating stage collapse at the Indiana State Fair. The pair said they always left the door open for reuniting.

“I think what we hope to do is get people excited. It’s not a big A-ha moment, but I think the reality is we never closed the door. We never said like, ‘We’re breaking up forever.’ We said, ‘Guys, we want to go do other things.’ So when you don’t close a door, you can walk back through it,” Nettles states. “And we’ve always said the whole time to our fans, when and if and as the time is right, we will come back and do this. So it was really that the stars were aligning in terms of timing, in terms of what we’ve been doing, in terms of what we want to do and what we want to revisit for the fans and ourselves.”

Sugarland, which started as a trio in 2002, has released five studio albums and has sold more than 14 million records on Mercury Records between 2004-2011. While no other details have been released, a representative with BMLG did confirm that “likely new music is coming soon” from the duo, but would not elaborate. We have confirmed that the new album is a joint venture with Big Machine Records and UMG Nashville. We will have more details as they become available.