Into The Music
Sublime are back. Not Sublime With Rome, not some tribute band working the festival circuit on nostalgia alone, but the actual surviving members of one of the most unlikely commercial success stories in 1990s rock, now flanked by Jakob Nowell carrying his late father’s torch. The announcement of Until the Sun Explodes, due June 12 on Atlantic Records, is the kind of news that lands differently depending on how old you were in 1997.
The album is the band’s first since their self-titled 1996 record, the one that came out two months after Bradley Nowell died of a heroin overdose in May of that year. It’s a 21-track collection, and the framing around it has been careful and deliberate. Jakob Nowell, now fronting a band his father built from nothing in Long Beach, California, said in a statement that the original self-titled record will always be the definitive Sublime document. “The last Sublime record that will ever be made is Self-Titled,” he said. “There’s no replacing history, period. Until the Sun Explodes the album is an epilogue, and ‘Until the Sun Explodes’ the single is the epilogue to the epilogue.”
That framing matters. It signals an awareness that what’s being done here isn’t a resurrection or a rewrite, but a closing chapter written by someone who grew up in that music’s shadow and has earned the right to add a postscript. Jakob, who stepped into his father’s role for their 2023 Coachella reunion shows, has been building toward this. The band also put out “Feel Like That” in 2024, a collaboration with reggae group Stick Figure that wove archival Bradley Nowell recordings into new material, a tentative step that seemed to test whether the legacy could hold weight again in a new context.
It can. The lead single and title track has the warm, loosely wound ska-punk energy that made songs like “What I Got” and “Santeria” feel like they’d been playing all summer before you first heard them. It’s not trying to compete with those tracks. It’s doing something more modest and probably more honest: it’s a thank you note, as Jakob put it, addressed to a father he lost at three years old and has been getting to know through records and rehearsals ever since.
The tracklist is sprawling enough to feel like a statement of intent rather than a tight commercial release. Collaborations include Fidlar, Skegss, H.R. of Bad Brains, G. Love, and Fletcher Dragge of Pennywise, a guest list that reads like a cross-generational punk and reggae family reunion. Lead single “Ensenada” has already been out for a while and warmed up the audience for whatever comes next.
Eric Wilson on bass and Bud Gaugh on drums form the rhythmic core that gave original Sublime its loose, sun-soaked groove. Whether the new album earns a place alongside the catalog or lands as a curious footnote is something listeners will decide for themselves come June. But the fact that it exists at all, framed with this much care and humility, makes it worth paying attention to.
