The first voice you hear on Sublime’s first record, 1992’s 40oz. to Freedom, belongs to Minutemen’s D. Boon. The last voice you hear on their last record, 1996’s Sublime, belongs to the Beastie Boys’ Ad-Rock. During its brief existence, the Long Beach trio treated squeaky South Bay punk and bratty white-boy hip-hop as the unlikely boundaries of their sampledelic dirtbag reggae. Though the music was caked in a house-party muck of stepped-on pizza, spilled bong water, and wetsuit sand, it was rooted in suffering and addiction—having a real bad time and trying to party through it. Put them on while you crush a case of Modelos at beach volleyball and Sublime sounds like a SoCal idyll, just three cool bros terrorizing the neighborhood. Listen at home and a surprisingly complex band begins to emerge. Singer Bradley Nowell drunk-steered his band through sordid anthems, crashing through references to classic ska and dancehall songs, shouting out Rudimentary Peni and Geto Boys, and re-setting the murder ballads and drug sprees of outlaw country in suburban California. Though they were misunderstood by critics in their time, 40oz. to Freedom and Sublime are smart music for people who make bad decisions. “They were great listeners, too,” Minutemen’s Mike Watt adds in a clip sampled on the first Sublime record in 30 years, Until the Sun Explodes.
Watt is right. If Until the Sun Explodes proves anything—besides the impossibility of replacing one of the most charismatic singers of the ’90s—it’s that Sublime are still great listeners. The problem is, they don’t seem to be listening to anything other than Sublime. Nowell died of a heroin overdose shortly before Sublime’s release, and his son Jakob, who was an infant at the time, now takes over the family business. The reverence with which Jakob approaches his task is impressive and obvious at first listen: He compressed “every chord progression, lyrical theme, sonic texture, and stylistic boundary” his dad laid to tape, according to a recent interview. It is at times unnerving how much he sounds, acts, and writes like Bradley. Not surprisingly, Until the Sun Explodes sounds like a classic Sublime album. But it’s strangely airless and almost distracted; it lacks the hyper-presence of the band’s classic records. Despite the herculean efforts of Nowell, original members Bud Gaugh and Eric Wilson, and producer Jon Joseph, listening to Until the Sun Explodes feels like scraping up the resin left behind by OG Sublime in the hopes of getting high. You may feel it a bit, but it’s largely cashed.
As the new frontman of a beloved band whose identity was almost entirely built around and by its one missing member, Jakob Nowell is in a situation that would be difficult for anyone—spare a thought for Rome. But by taking on his father’s former role, Nowell has put himself in an impossible position. Had Bradley survived, it’s not hard to imagine the band’s music expanding to incorporate calypso or palm wine, snaking out into Afrobeat, or forcing a little wub-wub into their rub-a-dub. Until the Sun Explodes doesn’t expand the definition of what a Sublime record can sound like, which may appease longtime devotees who can’t stomach the idea of hearing someone like 100 gecs on a Sublime track. Instead, Nowell roots the band’s sound in the mid-’90s and keeps his vocal mannerisms as close to Bradley’s as possible. Hear how he slides from the bear-hug gregariousness of “Ensenada”’s verses into the soft soul of its chorus; only two artists have ever been able to draw pathos from a line like “I just want to make love to a whore,” and both of them have fronted Sublime.
The fidelity to the band’s history makes the music feel stagnant. Like the city they call home, Sublime have set up a kind of breakwater to neutralize any rogue waves that might disrupt the steady flow of commerce. It feels safe and efficient, but wouldn’t it be so much sicker to see someone risk getting barreled in a tidy set? The lack of movement means there’s very little growth. Nowell peels off a solo in “Ensenada” that sounds similar to the one in 40 Oz.’s “Smoke Two Joints.” “Wizard” sets itself down with the same relieved sigh that ends “Santeria.” In “Can’t Miss You,” you can sense reflections of “Pool Shark,” “Let’s Go Get Stoned,” and “Greatest Hits.” With its choppy breakbeat and acoustic guitar solo, “F.T.R.” feels like a close cousin to “What I Got” without any of the underlying pain and charisma that made the original great—though it does have the whining synth that made “Garden Grove” great. The original Sublime loved to reference itself—there are bits of “Badfish” and “Waiting for My Ruca” in “Garden Grove”—but those are literal samples; Until the Sun Explodes feels more like attempts at forging a signature.
As with any convincing reenactment, there are some interesting moments. Nowell stumble-sprints through “247-369,” half-rapping, half-singing, his vocals teasing the edges of guest Fletcher Dragge’s guitar. A few interludes named for the Minutemen song “Maybe Partying Will Help” and the concluding “Thanx Again” make space for dubby experimentation, while Joseph’s production takes crispy horns and dunks them underwater in standout “Come Correct.”
That track features G. Love (hold the Special Sauce), who offers the stern warning that if you “fuck with my homie you’ll be torn from your ligament,” a weirdly aggressive turn from the “Milk & Cereal” guy. Sublime were always close to death and the threat of violence; their music was basically powered by the recklessness of their lifestyle. But Bradley typically found ways to complicate even his most despicable characters. While nothing on Until the Sun Explodes approaches the tastelessness of 40oz. single “Date Rape,” the generic pop-punk of “Personal Hell” makes it hard to either empathize with or demonize a character whom, should you “need a body buried, he’s the guy you should call.” “If he got away with murder, did he murder at all?” Nowell ponders. It’s an attempt to get inside the mind of a person lying to themself to justify their actions—a hallmark of Sublime’s songwriting and one of the primary ways songs like “Wrong Way” have been misinterpreted since the ’90s—but Jakob never gets past the surface. “Does he still hurt sometimes?” he asks, then answers his own question: “I don’t know.”
Though their self-titled album was released by a major and eventually sold over 5 million copies, Sublime was essentially a local band when they recorded it. The sloppy way they pasted Eazy E samples, hup-hup ska guitar, blatty trombones, wheezy G-funk synths, shoutouts to KRS-One, and covers of the Grateful Dead, the Descendents, Toots and the Maytals, and George Gershwin grounded their music in Long Beach. It’s a gritty place 30 miles down the freeway from L.A., refreshingly lacking in glamor and proud of its working-class cosmopolitanism. Like few other bands of their stature, Sublime cannot be understood apart from their geographical and cultural context.
This version of this band knows their history. Nowell’s narrators bum around Long Beach, picking up lovers off the 710 freeway, popping an “LBDub CD” into the Pioneer, repping 40oz. producer Miguel Happoldt’s band Perro Bravo while doing blow backstage. The album was recorded on the other side of the port in San Pedro, and the closing “Thanx Again” shouts out Opie Ortiz, who designed the band’s sun icon and still tattoos in Long Beach, and Marshall “Ras MG” Goodman, probably the only mayor of La Palma, CA, whose name has been sung by Lana Del Rey. They are still, after all these years, well qualified to represent the LBC.
And yet, for all of its authenticity, Until the Sun Explodes never feels like the real deal. Maybe it’s the studiousness of the band’s approach, maybe it’s the fact that clearing name-brand samples is way more expensive in 2026 than it was in 1996, but the entire thing feels like a museum exhibit, an appropriate release from a band that has finally become enshrined in the civic life of Long Beach. Like an AI chatbot, Until the Sun Explodes has all the data but little of the soul that made Sublime transcendent.
