Sublime announced this week that Until the Sun Explodes, their first album since 1996, will arrive on June 12 via Atlantic. The lineup is Jakob Nowell on guitar and vocals, joined by founding members Eric Wilson and Bud Gaugh. The single, also called “Until the Sun Explodes,” was shot around Long Beach and features cameos from pro skateboarders. The press statement from Jakob Nowell described the album as an epilogue, and the single as the epilogue to the epilogue.

That framing is honest, and it sets up the central tension that will follow this record wherever it goes.

Bradley Nowell died of a heroin overdose in May 1996, two months before Sublime’s self-titled album was released. He was 28. The band he left behind became one of the more improbable commercial phenomena of the late 1990s: a ska-punk-reggae-hip-hop band from Long Beach that had barely registered during its lifetime exploding into mainstream consciousness after its frontman was already gone. 40oz. to Freedom was a college dorm room staple. “What I Got” and “Santeria” were everywhere. Sublime became the kind of band that people discover at 17 and feel extremely personally about, often forever.

Wilson and Gaugh did what musicians do: they kept playing. For years they toured under various configurations, eventually settling on Sublime With Rome, with Rome Ramirez fronting a version of the band that was explicitly a continuation rather than a resurrection. Ramirez was good at the job. The project was met with the ambivalence you would expect from fans who felt territorial about the original, but it worked as a live act and kept the music alive for a generation that had not been there the first time.

Then came Coachella 2024, and Jakob Nowell. Bradley’s son was 25, the same age his father had been in Sublime’s early years, and performing his father’s songs to a crowd that knew every word. The optics were powerful, maybe too powerful. Critics noted the weight of it. Supporters noted that Jakob had grown up in this music, that it was his by blood and by choice, and that the performance itself was electric rather than mournful.

Until the Sun Explodes is what comes after that moment. The album is 21 tracks long, which is either a statement of intent or a lack of editorial discipline, possibly both. The tracklist includes features from Fidlar, Skegss, H.R. of Bad Brains, G. Love, and Fletcher Dragge of Pennywise, a guest list that reads like a love letter to a certain strain of Southern California DIY culture. Bad Brains on a Sublime album is not a subtle choice.

The question every legacy record has to answer, whether it wants to or not, is: why does this exist? The cynical answer is money, touring leverage, a catalog play. The generous answer is grief and love and the genuine need to say something that has been building for a long time. Both answers can be true at once. Usually they are.

Jakob Nowell’s statement threads this carefully. He explicitly defers to the self-titled album as the last true Sublime record. He positions Until the Sun Explodes as tribute and thank-you, not continuation. That is a structurally humble move. It is also smart, because it pre-empts the comparison that would otherwise crush the record before anyone hears it.

Whether the music earns this framing remains to be heard. But the ambition is real, and the context is genuinely complicated in ways that make it worth taking seriously rather than dismissing on principle. Legacy bands exist on a spectrum from cash grab to genuine creative survival, and where a given project falls on that spectrum is almost always decided by the music itself. June 12 is when that argument actually starts.