Jakob Nowell says Sublime’s new album, Until the Sun Explodes, is a love letter to his father and the start of what he calls the band’s fourth era. The album is set for release Friday, June 12, giving the Long Beach group a fresh chapter nearly three decades after Bradley Nowell’s death.
The timing matters because Jakob Nowell is not just talking about a legacy act from rock’s past. He has been frontman for Sublime since 2023, and now the son of the man who helped build the band is fronting a new record that tries to carry that name forward on his own terms.
Sublime’s history has long been tied to loss and reinvention. Bradley Nowell, Bud Gaugh and Eric Wilson formed the band in 1988, and Bradley Nowell died in 1996 from a heroin overdose at 28. Two months later, Sublime’s self-titled album arrived and went five-times platinum, powered by songs like What I Got, Santeria and Wrong Way that still anchor the band’s identity for listeners old and new.
That legacy has never sat still. Gaugh and Wilson formed Long Beach Dub Allstars in 1997, while Sublime With Rome ran from 2009 to 2024 with Rome Ramirez on vocals, Wilson involved for most of that run and Gaugh in the first two years. Jakob Nowell has said that era was the band’s third, which leaves Until the Sun Explodes as the next reset point in a lineage that has already outlived its original frontman by a generation.
That is also what gives his description weight. Nowell was 11 months old when his father died, and he has grown into the role after an early interest in music, years of self-taught guitar, teen struggles with drug use and alcoholism, and sobriety at 17 with help from interventionist Todd Zalkins. He and other family members later established the Nowell Family Foundation to support addiction recovery for musicians, turning a family wound into something closer to a public mission.
Nowell has framed the project not as nostalgia but as renewal, saying he hopes people see it as a renaissance and describing Sublime as a “fun, messy, chaotic punk band” that can belong to parents, children and newer fans at the same time. Bud Gaugh offered a similar view, calling the release a natural progression and saying, “This is my band, too.” The unresolved question is not whether Sublime still has an audience; it clearly does. It is how much of the band’s old sound survives when the name now carries Bradley Nowell’s son into a fourth era of his own.
