Siobhán Donaghy has put a ghost on a record before. In 2007, six years after she walked away from the group she had joined as a teenager, she released a solo album called Ghosts on Parlophone. On Thursday (Sept 24), she and her original bandmates Keisha Buchanan and Mutya Buena released "Ghost," the lead single from a self-titled Sugababes album due Feb. 12, 2027, through Sacred Three and The Orchard.

The album carries 12 tracks and lands as the first full project the three women have built from scratch since their 2000 debut, One Touch. Their 2022 release, The Lost Tapes, gathered songs the trio had cut under a different name between 2011 and 2013. Those recordings had already leaked online, which made that project an archive release rather than a new record. This one they planned from the first session. In the announcement, the group said that the longer they worked on it, the clearer it became that "there was only one thing we could call it: Sugababes."

Donaghy left in 2001 and was replaced by Heidi Range, and Buena left in December 2005 and was replaced by Amelle Berrabah. Buchanan, the last founding member standing, was replaced by Jade Ewen in September 2009. For two years after that, a group called Sugababes kept releasing music with none of the women who had started it.

The name's biggest sales came after the founders began leaving. With Range in the lineup, the group released three multi-platinum albums between 2002 and 2005. The third of them, Taller in More Ways, became its first No. 1 album in the U.K., and "Push the Button" reached No. 1 in five countries. The Berrabah-era album Change topped the U.K. chart again in 2007, and its lead single, "About You Now," became the group's best-selling song in Britain. Buchanan sang on every one of those records.

Buena eventually went to court over the name, arguing that the group had effectively ceased to exist once Buchanan was gone. The original three reunited in 2011, recorded as Mutya Keisha Siobhán, and put out the single "Flatline" in 2013 under the initials MKS while the legal fight dragged on. They did not win the name back until 2019.

Buchanan described that fight to British Vogue this week in plain terms. She said the rights traced back to old contracts, that the process cost the group financially, and that "I had to take on a few giants" to get it done.

What followed in 2019 was a slow build rather than a single splashy return. The trio's first release under the reclaimed name, in October 2019, was a cover of "Flowers," the Sweet Female Attitude garage record, and in 2021 they reissued One Touch for its 20th anniversary. When they played the Avalon stage at Glastonbury in 2022, the area had to be closed off after thousands more fans arrived than organizers expected. They followed it with a one-night show at London's O2 arena in September 2023, and their return to Glastonbury in 2024 caused another security shutdown.

The trio released three singles independently across 2025. "Jungle" debuted at No. 15 on both the U.K. Singles Sales and Singles Downloads charts in March 2025, and "Weeds," released that April, picked up an Ivor Novello nomination. "Shook" followed in July. All three sit on the new album, with "Jungle" at No. 2 in the sequence and "Ghost" right behind it.

"Ghost" was written by the three members with Jon Shave, whose credits include Charli xcx, Jessie Ware and Zara Larsson, and Wayne Hector, who has written for Nicki Minaj and Tate McRae. The song deals with the stretch of time after a relationship ends, when someone is gone from your life but still present in your head, and Donaghy has said the story is hers.

She told British Vogue that it goes back to her first serious relationship, with a boyfriend who disappeared without explanation. "He essentially ghosted me before we even had the terminology for it," she said. She added that she used to joke it would have been easier if he had died, because mourning a person who is still alive felt so strange.

Her earlier album came out of very different circumstances. When she quit the group, London Records dropped the Sugababes and kept Donaghy on as a solo artist. Years later, she recorded Ghosts over 18 months at producer James Sanger's home studio, inside a 500-year-old manor in northern France that picked up no television or radio signal. This time the song about a ghost carries a shared writing credit with her bandmates.

The single is on streaming services now, and the video, directed by Thomas James, was scheduled to premiere at 5 p.m. BST on Thursday, which is noon on the East Coast.

Beyond the lead single, the tracklist shows a group that has decided to move across genres rather than settle into one lane for comfort. "Modern Love," which the trio already tested live during their summer shows, leans on U.K. garage, and "After All" draws on Amapiano. "Scorpio" is built for the club and "Love Language" brings in an orchestral arrangement, according to the album details released with the announcement. The record opens with "Peace & Love" and closes with "Full Circle."

Some of that material has already had a crowd test. The trio's 2026 summer calendar included a headline date at the Labyrinth Open Air series at Tofte Manor in Bedfordshire and a slot atop the Depot in the Castle lineup in Cardiff, Stereoboard reported. Those summer sets were where fans first heard "Modern Love" live, months before the song had a home on a tracklist.

The production credits reach past the "Ghost" writers to Anya Jones, PRGRSHN, Simon Aldred and George Moore, but the vocal production stayed in the band. Buchanan, Buena and Donaghy produced every vocal on the album themselves. The harmony stacks, the parts each woman takes and the order they come in all stayed with the three people who built the group's sound as teenagers in north-west London.

The visual campaign loops back the same way. Liz Collins, the photographer who shot the cover of One Touch in 2000, shot the cover for the new album too. The first and latest album covers from this lineup were made by the same photographer 26 years apart.

Buchanan, asked about the gap, told British Vogue that she sees the three of them now as "just elevated versions of our teen selves," with plenty the same and plenty changed.

Legacy girl groups have spent 2026 learning where their audiences actually live. The Pussycat Dolls, touring as three of their six members, canceled their entire North American leg in May and rebuilt the run around U.K. and European dates. The Sugababes spent their summer playing shows and their year finishing a record, and they came back with an album that carries the name they spent most of a decade fighting to use.

Pre-orders opened Thursday alongside the single. The album arrives Feb. 12, 2027, and "Ghost" is the third track.