Until The Sun Explodes: How a Dead Man’s Son Became the Voice of One of Rock’s Mythological Bands

Rarely do album announcements have real emotional resonance instead of deliberate hype. The majority feel like news disguised as marketing. This one was not like the others. Something clicked when Sublime announced on Instagram last week that their first new album in thirty years, titled Until The Sun Explodes, would be released on June 12. Jakob Nowell, the 30-year-old son of the band’s late co-founding singer Bradley Nowell, wrote the title track as a letter to his deceased father. Moments that feel this particular, this intimate, or this truly unsolvable are rare in the music business.
Two months prior to the release of Sublime’s self-titled album, which would go on to sell millions of copies, define the Southern California sound of the late nineties, and transform a Long Beach ska-punk band into something more akin to mythology, Bradley Nowell passed away from a heroin overdose on May 25, 1996. He never heard how his best work was received by the world. When he passed away, his son Jakob was two years old. Bradley’s final creation, the album that successfully began the family legacy, arrived as an orphan in the truest sense of the word.

Everything about Until The Sun Explodes is rooted in that context, which is why Jakob’s framing of the project is so important. He stated, “The self-titled, hands down, period will be the last true Sublime record,” and he is correct. He’s not making an effort to occupy that space. He is constructing what he refers to as an epilogue, a term that recognizes the conclusion without disputing its own existence. “Until the sun blows up in the sky, I owe you my life” is a direct message to his father in the title track, which has already been released as the lead single along with a music video shot at Long Beach locations connected to the band’s history. Christian Hosoi and Omar Hassan, two legendary skateboarders, make appearances in the video, weaving together the Southern California punk and skate culture that Sublime was always entwined with. It sounds and looks like Long Beach in a way that can only be produced there.
This album seems to have been handled with unusual care. In order to catalog every chord progression, lyrical theme, and sonic boundary in the current Sublime catalog, Jakob, original bassist Eric Wilson, and drummer Bud Gaugh took the time to create a research document that included Venn diagrams, spreadsheets, and lengthy discussions about what is and isn’t canonical. Although it sounds nerdy to explain, Gaugh claims that the result felt more natural from the first rehearsal than anything he had done with Rome Ramirez in Sublime With Rome. “From day one, it seemed way more natural,” he stated. “The sound and the chemistry were both present. It truly transported me back to Brad and the mid-1990s.” For his part, Eric Wilson called Jakob “a sober version of Brad”—a comparison that is more difficult to understand when you consider that Jakob became clean in 2017 and has been open about his own struggles with addiction, which are exactly similar to those of his father.
The album’s lead single, “Ensenada,” which subtly surfaced on radio prior to the full album’s release, topped Billboard’s Alternative Airplay chart for two months, more than any other song in 2025. It’s not a footnote. That’s what the market is actually telling you about the viability of this version of Sublime. Australian surf-rock group Skegss, Pennywise guitarist Fletcher Dragge, G. Love, FIDLAR, and H.R. from Bad Brains are among the guests on the 21-track album. Instead of aiming for borrowed relevance, the collaborations point to a band that is still in the right circles.
Nevertheless, it’s worthwhile to consider the intricacy of this situation. Both in public and seemingly to himself, Jakob has made it clear that this is the album he records with Sublime and that it is likely the only complete album he plans to produce. After that, he intends to return to his own project, Jakobs Castle. He’s not trying to establish a dynasty. He’s making a settlement. He remarked, “This Sublime record is the work that right now I’m the most proud of ever having made,” which is a startling statement about an album that will unavoidably be compared to work he had no influence over and that was produced by a father he hardly knew. It’s possible that, apart from nostalgia, the album merits that pride on its own terms. Additionally, it’s possible that listeners won’t allow it to exist there.
The band will perform the entire album at two Red Rocks shows in April prior to its release. With its sandstone amphitheater carved into the Colorado mountains, Red Rocks often gives concerts a sense of gravity that venues in flatlands are unable to match. The location seems almost too appropriate for an album titled Until The Sun Explodes, which is performed at a height under an open sky. The album, which bills itself as an ending, is the focal point of the band’s entire season, which includes a traveling festival and a branded Miami cruise in the fall. Perhaps the conclusion strikes a chord with people in a way that only truly earned conclusions do.