Into The Music
Sublime just announced their first album in thirty years, and ska-punk is suddenly a topic again. Until the Sun Explodes comes out June 12 via Atlantic, with Jakob Nowell fronting the band his father Bradley built before dying of a heroin overdose two months before their self-titled 1996 record was released. The announcement is a moment to actually think about what ska-punk is, what it accomplished, and why it refuses to stay dead.
Ska-punk is one of the more maligned genre labels in popular music, mostly because the word “ska” attached to almost anything in the late 1990s could guarantee a certain kind of eye roll. But the genre itself, at its best, was doing something genuinely exciting. It took the offbeat rhythmic structure of Jamaican ska, the tempos and energy of American punk, and the melodic looseness of reggae and forced them to coexist in a way that was genuinely strange. The results were not always coherent but they were frequently alive in a way that more carefully assembled music was not.
The genre has two distinct lineages worth understanding. The first wave was British, built in the early 1980s around bands like The Specials, Madness, and the Beat. This music was explicitly political, drawing on the multicultural experience of post-war Britain and the racial tension of Thatcher’s England. The two-tone aesthetic of the Specials was both a visual and a social statement. “Ghost Town” remains one of the most devastating protest songs in British pop history, and it rides a ska rhythm.
The second wave, the one that produced Sublime and most of what people in North America associate with the genre, was largely American and largely Californian. The Mighty Mighty Bosstones, No Doubt, Less Than Jake, Reel Big Fish, Streetlight Manifesto, and Sublime itself all came from this era, roughly the late 1980s through the late 1990s. The politics were mostly gone. What replaced them was energy, humor, and a certain sun-damaged looseness that made the music feel like it was always slightly about summer and the beach even when it was not.
Sublime specifically occupied a strange space. Bradley Nowell was genuinely talented in a way that most of his genre peers were not. “What I Got,” “Santeria,” “Wrong Way,” and “Doin’ Time” are not just ska-punk songs. They are songs. The genre was a vehicle rather than a constraint. The self-titled 1996 album, released posthumously, went triple platinum and influenced essentially everyone who came after in the Southern California punk-adjacent scene.
What has happened to ska-punk in the thirty years since its commercial peak is genuinely interesting. It never disappeared. It maintained a devoted live circuit, continued producing new bands and new albums, and built the kind of fervent underground fandom that keeps genres alive through fashion cycles. When artists like Olivia Rodrigo and others in the early 2020s started incorporating the jagged guitar tones and offbeat rhythms of third-wave ska into pop production, it arrived as a surprise only to people who had not been paying attention. The genre had been incubating the whole time.
Until the Sun Explodes, whatever its artistic merits turn out to be, is a reminder that ska-punk has a genuine legacy worth considering seriously. Jakob Nowell’s statement about the record being an “epilogue” rather than a continuation is honest about what it is. The band his father built cannot be rebuilt. But the music that came out of that era is real, and it shaped a generation of musicians who are still working through its influence in ways they may not entirely recognize.
Ska-punk was always better than its reputation. It will probably outlast it.
What interests me about ska-punk’s survival is structural rather than nostalgic , it operates the same way Laurie Anderson described performance art: it only works when the audience doesn’t know exactly what’s coming next. The off-beat skank creates constant productive instability, a body that’s always slightly ahead of or behind the beat. That rhythmic contract is why it won’t die. It’s physically compelling in a way that doesn’t require cultural context to feel.
A new Sublime album with Jakob Nowell on vocals. I’ll be honest , I approached this with considerable skepticism. Filling Bradley Nowell’s shoes is not a task any sensible person takes on, and I say this as someone who thinks “What I Got” is better than most of what Blue Note put out in the late 90s, which is saying something. But if the kid has the feel , and some people are just born with it , then maybe I’ll be surprised. I’ve been surprised before.
“Until the Sun Explodes” is such an unhinged album title and I mean that with complete love. Sublime was always about that energy , slightly too big, slightly too raw, the feeling that the song might fall apart at any second but somehow doesn’t. I had “Santeria” on repeat for a whole summer and I don’t think I was the only one. This news hit me right in the chest.