The group had blacked out their social media prior to announcing the release on February 28. Us Weekly had also revealed the title of the song before the announcement. On The Late Late Show with James Corden, Nick Jonas stated that "We've kept this a secret now for almost seven, eight months." In terms of musical notation, the song is composed in time and the key of C♯ minor with moderately fast tempo of 138 beats per minute. The band's vocals span a range of B4 to C♯6.
Chart performance
In the United States, "Sucker" debuted at number one on the BillboardHot 100 and the US Hot Digital Songs chart, with 88,000 copies sold in its first week. It was the thirty-fourth song to debut atop the Billboard Hot 100. "Sucker" became the Jonas Brothers' first number-one song and the first number one by a boy band on the chart since 2003's "Bump, Bump, Bump" by B2K featuring P. Diddy. It became the band's first entry on the chart since 2013's "Pom Poms" and their first top 10 since 2008's "Tonight". The Jonas Brothers also became the second group in a lead role in history to have a song debuted at number one after Aerosmith's rock ballad "I Don't Want to Miss a Thing" from Armageddon and the first group in this century to achieve this. It fell to number six the following week, but as airplay continued to rise the song was able to return to the top five in May and reached as high as number three on May 27, while also reaching the top of the Radio Songs chart. The song ultimately spent 22 weeks in the top ten of the chart before falling 9-12 on August 17, 2019. In the April 20, 2019 issue of Billboard'sDance/Mix Show Airplay Chart, "Sucker" became the Jonas' first number one, surging to the top spot within four weeks. This was also their first song in the United Kingdom to chart the Top 10 and consequently, the Top 5, debuting at number 6 and later peaking at number 4 on the fourth week. As of May 8, 2019, the song had over 630 million global streams.
On March 7, 2019, the Jonas Brothers performed the song for the first time on The Late Late Show with James Corden. On May 2, 2019, they performed the song at the Billboard Music Awards alongside with Nick's debut hit Jealous and Joe's hit song Cake by the Ocean with his band DNCE. On May 11, 2019, they performed the song again on Saturday Night Live as the musical guests. They also performed the song on the first episode of All That's revival on June 15, 2019. The Jonas Brothers performed "Sucker" along "X" and "What A Man Gotta Do" as Exclusive 'home' sessions recorded especially for Radio 1's Big Weekend.
Plagiarism allegations
American rock band, Portugal. The Man accused the Jonas Brothers' song as copying their 2017 single, "Feel It Still". Portugal. The Man tweeted: "To be fair, the chorus of Feel It Still sounds very similar to Please Mister Postman by the Marvelettes... Which we respectfully cleared and thanked them for every chance we got. As one does. @jonasbrothers" The band later clarified saying that they were "not mad at all", and that they "actually dig a lot of their music and Nick's solo records".
