Brian Hiatt
Contact Brian Hiatt on X View all posts by Brian Hiatt March 25, 2026
"This is the epilogue," says Jakob Nowell, who's replaced his late father as the frontman of Sublime Micala Austin* For the first time since 1996, Sublime will release a brand-new album, Until the Sun Explodes, June 12, with Jakob Nowell — the late Bradley Nowell‘s son — on vocals alongside original members Eric Wilson on bass and Bud Gaugh on drums. Jakob, who originally imagined a more limited involvement with the band when he first signed on in 2023, tells Rolling Stone that he kept finding himself deeper and deeper in.
“It’s kind of like being a drug addict,” says Jakob, who got sober in 2017. “You’re like, ‘Oh, I drink, but I don’t do coke.’ And it’s like, ‘OK, I do blow, but I would never do blank.’ And then you just keep going. I was like, ‘Well, I’ll sing one of the songs, but I’ll never join the band. OK, I’ll join the band, but I’m not going to step on people’s toes and write a new record.'” He laughs. “And so I’m like, God, where am I? What am I doing?”
Even though the band’s upcoming LP is being released under the name Sublime — and uncannily channels an awful lot of the band’s sonic essence — Nowell doesn’t quite consider it the real thing. “The last true Sublime record will be [1996’s] self-titled, hands down, period,” says Nowell, who also records his own music under the name Jakobs Castle. “You can’t compete with mythology. This is the epilogue.”
The album pulls in guests including H.R. from Bad Brains, Pennywise guitarist Fletcher Dragge, and G Love, plus FIDLAR and Australian surf-rockers Skegss. The title track and lead single is out today, alongside a video filmed at spots around Long Beach that carry weight in the Sublime story, with pro skaters Christian Hosoi and Omar Hassan making appearances. The album’s opening track, “Ensenada,” already dominated Billboard’s Alternative Airplay chart for two months straight last year, holding the Number One spot longer than any other song on that chart in 2025.
Gaugh, who only briefly played with Wilson in his now-defunct collaboration with Rome Ramirez, Sublime With Rome, says the album validated something he felt from the first rehearsal with Jakob. “From day one, it seemed way more natural than anything we had done previously,” he says. “The chemistry and the sound — it was all there. It really brought me back to the mid-Nineties with Brad.”
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“He totally reminds me of a sober version of Brad,” adds Wilson.
Gaugh describes Jakob’s songs as a direct continuation of Bradley’s habit of writing about his daily life (including immortalizing his pet, Louie Dog) and events around him, including the L.A. riots. “Jake took that same recipe and started writing about things that were happening in his life, in our lives, right now,” Gaugh says. “That really impressed me — the way he caught onto that and followed that prescription.”
When it came time to write, Jakob, touring guitarist Zeno, and producer John Joseph built a comprehensive research document cataloguing every chord progression, lyrical theme, sonic texture, and stylistic boundary in the Sublime discography. They went as far as making Venn diagrams and spreadsheets, while debating what was and was not “canonical” to the band’s sound. “It sounds a little contrived,” Nowell admits, “but we didn’t do it out of a sense of, ‘Oh God, we need to do this or else.’ We were having a blast, dude.” The key, he says, was a two-phase approach: “We had to learn the book, and then burn the book.”
For all the geekiness, Nowell says the actual secret was chasing the “true process of Sublime — that fun, wild craziness in the moment, that sort of altered state of consciousness that you get from making music with your friends and staying up all goddamn night.” On the track “Evil Men,” he took that approach to an extreme, staying awake for days trying to reach a trance-like creative state before free-styling the song. “I don’t get high no more,” he says, “so I was like, fuck, I need to get into some kind of altered state to commune with the gods.” .
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Jakob thought about his father constantly throughout the making of the album “It’s all for him,” he says. “I wouldn’t be here doing this if not for him. And I’d prefer it would be him doing it.”
“If Bradley were here, we would have probably been writing material as Sublime and then had Jake come and guest on a few songs,” says Gaugh. “I am certain of that.”
The album arrives a month before the 30th anniversary of Sublime, and the band plan to play the whole album start to finish at their two Red Rocks shows in April. They’re also launching their own traveling festival this spring and sailing a branded cruise out of Miami in the fall.
Wilson never expected any of this. “I never thought I was gonna be 56 years old,” he says. “If I would’ve known that I was going to be 56, I’d probably take better care of myself.”
