"Sugar on the Side" is the opening track on, and second single from, Blondie's tenth studio album Ghosts of Download. It was released as a digital download on December 17, 2013, in the US and Canada, but has not been released in any other countries. The song features the Colombian hip-hop/cumbia band Systema Solar.

The song was written by Blondie's co-founder and guitarist Chris Stein, who contributed to most of the tracks on the album, as well as Jeff Saltzman, the band's producer of two albums, and Natalie Hawkins, Saltzman's assistant. Systema Solar also provided the Spanish and Mexican lyrics for their rap verses in the song. Stein, Saltzman and Hawkins also contributed to most of the tracks on the album.

Musically, the song is a dance-pop and synthpop song, as with the rest of "Ghosts of Download", although this song included elements of Latin-American music genres such as cumbia; Chris Stein had been commenting in interviews during 2013 that he was very interested in Latin American music and had been listening to a lot of it, so he incorporated that sound into the album, such as in a GQ interview in May 2014 where he said: "I was just influenced by a lot of the current music I'm listening to, especially modern Latin music." In the same interview, Stein commented of this track:

"I first heard Systema Solar via one track on a compilation record and then I went out and bought their album and listened to it consistently for quite a while. It's just terrific stuff, my Spanish is really lousy but there's something super fresh that's going on with modern Latin music. I like reggaeton, cumbia styles and all the electronica is great. They came back to us right away when we asked them if they would like to be on the record, but they were sometimes hard to get hold of. After we already started working with them, we were waiting for some stuff from one of the guys and he appeared a couple of days later apologising that he'd been in the jungle and didn't have any internet! Debbie has since sung with them on their second record on a really nice track. There's a musical conversation we're having, we have a lot of respect for them, they're awesome guys."

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