Sublime announced this week that their first album in 30 years, Until the Sun Explodes, will arrive June 12 via Atlantic. The record features Jakob Nowell on vocals alongside original members Eric Wilson and Bud Gaugh. Two years after the band’s Coachella comeback shows first raised the question of what a new Sublime would actually sound like, an answer is coming.

The album is arriving with a frame already built around it. Jakob Nowell has been explicit: this is not a replacement for his father. Bradley Nowell died in 1996, two months before the self-titled album that would make Sublime a household name outside of Long Beach. That record sold somewhere north of seven million copies in the United States. “What I Got” and “Santeria” are on every classic rock station that still exists. The band’s mythology is tied to a man who never heard any of it happen.

So what does it mean to carry that forward?

The question is not unique to Sublime. Rock and roll has always had to figure out what to do when a central figure is gone. Some bands dissolve. Some find their way to a qualified continuation. The Grateful Dead turned into Dead and Company and then a handful of other configurations. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers had the unenviable situation of Tom Petty dying mid-tour in 2017 and surviving members figuring out how to keep going without their gravitational center.

The Sublime situation is different because the heir is literal. Jakob Nowell is Bradley’s son. He grew up in the mythology, surrounded by his father’s music, credited on an album he was too young to remember being made. When the band first brought him on stage for the Coachella reunion shows, the response was emotional in a way that went past typical nostalgia. People were not just hearing old songs. They were watching someone carry a name they were born into.

Jakob has been clear that he does not want to be a tribute act. The press statement around the new album positions it as an epilogue, a tribute that is also its own thing. The title track is described as an acknowledgment of everything his father did and an attempt to move past reverence into something generative. Whether the album delivers on that framing remains to be heard.

What makes the Sublime case genuinely interesting is how their original catalog was built. The self-titled 1996 record drew from ska, reggae, punk, hip-hop, and Southern California acoustic folk in ways that should not have cohered but absolutely did. Bradley Nowell had an instinct for arrangement and texture that made songs feel both loose and precise at once. You cannot replicate that by hiring a producer and a vocal coach. Either Jakob has something that approximates it, or the new record will sound like a well-intentioned copy.

The earlier single “Ensenada” suggested the former. It has the rhythmic looseness and melodic warmth that made the original band worth caring about. It does not try to be “Santeria 2.” It tries to be a song, and it succeeds. That is the version of this project that could work.

Until the Sun Explodes will be released into a music landscape that has changed enormously since 1996. The ska-punk and reggae-rock sounds that Sublime helped define had their commercial moment in the late 1990s and then largely retreated to a niche. Bands like Stick Figure and Slightly Stoopid have kept the tradition alive at a lower altitude. Whether a new Sublime record can break out of that niche or whether it will land primarily with people who already know every word to “Badfish” is an open question.

But the ambition behind the project is worth taking seriously. Not every band that loses its founding voice tries to become something new. Most just stop, or loop indefinitely through reunion shows and anniversary tours. Sublime is attempting something harder: actually making new music and asking an audience to evaluate it on its own terms.

That takes a different kind of courage than just showing up and playing the hits. June 12 will tell us whether it paid off.