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.”
“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 Zayno, and producer Jon 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.”
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.”
The three members disagree over whether this incarnation of Sublime will record again. Wilson wants to keep going and sees no reason to stop, and Gaugh is open to continuing. Nowell is reluctant. “I think it will be the only full record I make with Sublime,” he says. “Maybe in another 30 years we’ll make another one.”
Nowell has already started thinking about his next Jakobs Castle album, and he plans to scale back Sublime shows after this year. But he says this album solved a lot of issues for him “How do I feel about this death or being related to this mythological figure or living in a shadow — all of that just melted away into the studio, man. This Sublime record is the work that right now I’m the most proud of ever having made.”
Jay-Z performing at the Stade de France in Saint-Denis in Paris.
Jay-Z Deserves the Super Bowl Halftime Gig
Where’s the love? Jay-Z asked that question 25 years ago, in the chorus of one of many songs in his catalog that still move audiences today. If he performs “Heart of the City” as part of his Super Bowl halftime show next February, those indignant bars are sure to be a highlight: “First the Fat Boys break up, now every day I wake up, somebody got a problem with Hov…” It would be an appropriate choice, too — because then as now, any time Jay-Z notches a new achievement, people find a way to complain.
The jokes and nonsense started almost as soon as the first rumors trickled out that Jay, whose company Roc Nation has executive-produced the Super Bowl halftime show since 2019, might be choosing himself to headline next year’s show. “Jay-Z just Dick Cheney’d himself for the Super Bowl,” Puck‘s Matthew Belloni quipped on X last week, alluding to the time that the late prince of darkness, who’d been asked to run the vice-presidential search committee for George W. Bush’s 2000 campaign, put himself on the ticket. (Super hip and current reference, and not at all apples-and-oranges.) Others pointed to TMZ reports that pop stars like Harry Styles and Justin Bieber had been asked first. “How are they the frontrunners, and he end up in the front?” Cam’Ron, who’s delighted in trolling Jay for many years, wondered aloud on his podcast. “Out of all the people on the roster, they couldn’t pick nobody else?” asked Cam’Ron‘s co-host, Ma$e.
These critiques miss the point, which is that Jay-Z is one of the best choices for a high-profile gig like this. He’s a superstar with a comparable level of name recognition to any other A-lister in music. He has a deep stack of classic songs going back decades. And he’s a highly skillful live performer who knows his way around a stadium stage, as he’s spent this year reminding people on his Jay-Z 30 tour. He tore down Yankee Stadium three nights in a row this summer; just last week, he rocked SoFi Stadium, which happens to be the same place where the 2027 Super Bowl is being held. He held the crowd’s attention with ease at all of those shows, and though there were plenty of glittery guests — that’s a given at a Jay show, and it will surely be true at the Super Bowl, too — he did it mostly through the force of his own magnetic energy. Let’s state the obvious here: Jay-Z is really, really good at rapping. We’re talking about one of the slickest, sharpest talkers in the history of words, someone who made it to the top through a sustained act of myth-making, then kept going. Are we seriously asking whether he can handle a 15-minute televised performance?
And yeah, there’s a touch of self-congratulation in the way he appointed himself. So what? Praising his own gifts is arguably Jay-Z’s greatest talent of all. He made a fine art out of self-applause. He told his story again and again, retracing the steps from Marcy Projects to the corner suite, and he made us believe. It would almost be insulting to the audience if he didn’t give himself the gig at some point.
Pop culture observers in recent years surely remember the backlash to Super Bowl headliners like Kendrick Lamar and Bad Bunny — all of it at least culturally conservative, and much of it frankly just racist. The blowback to Jay’s announcement is mostly coming from other quarters, at least for now (let’s just wait to see what the right-wing swamps make of this one). But it’s disappointing in a different way. Jay-Z has spent his career expounding hip-hop as a mainstream commercial force. He’s not a businessman, he’s a business, man. But he’s also an artist. He’s made huge amounts of money, and gotten himself into the rarefied rooms where he even has the ability to give himself a gig like this, by spinning his experiences into compelling narrative art, one verse at a time. Let’s not lose sight of how impressive his life’s work really is. Jay-Z is not some random C-suite bro, and he’s definitely not Dick Cheney. He’s one of the greatest rappers of all time, by any measure. He’s earned that Super Bowl spot.