Jakob Nowell, son of late Sublime singer Bradley Nowell, made his official debut as the revived band’s frontman at Coachella last year, and now he’s working with original members Eric Wilson and Bud Gaugh on a potential new album — which would be the the first from Sublime since 1996’s multi-platinum Sublime, released just after Bradley’s death. “It’s the epilogue,” Jakob tells Rolling Stone. “Something that explores my lifetime relationship with this amazing body of work from a figure that I really never even got to meet, a figure who inspired so many music listeners and musicians around the world.”
Nowell, 29, just spent a week in the studio with Blink-182 drummer Travis Barker and producer John Feldmann to write songs for the project. “Dude, those guys are awesome,” says Nowell, who plans to start recording with Wilson and Gaugh soon. “Travis is an old-school fan and scholar of the Sublime catalog… They feel like family members now too, man. There was that feeling from everyone that what we’re doing here is something generational and special on an emotional, spiritual, familial level.” (“This is going to be really special,” Barker added in a statement. “Bradley comes through his son Jakob… Chills every day in the studio when he sings and plays guitar.”)
Nowell, who also records alt-pop under the band name Jakobs Castle, isn’t interested in modernizing Sublime’s sound. “The goal is not to create something that is, like, ‘This is what Sublime would be today in 2025,’” he says. “No, just more of a solid respect and homage to the works of Sublime.”
In addition to brand-new compositions, Nowell is also digging back into studio archives of his dad’s unfinished ideas. Sublime already scored an alt-rock radio hit last year with “Feel Like That,” which features both father and son on vocals. “We’re combing through and trying to distill down what makes a Sublime song a Sublime song,” Jakob says. “It’s been this fun learning process to get close to and get to know my lost family member in a spiritual sense. I think we leave so much of ourselves, like this blueprint of our DNA, in the work that we create and put out there. So really it’s been also a fact-finding mission.”
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In between tour dates with the band, Jakob has also immersed himself in their diverse influences, including the Minutemen, Bad Brains, “a lot of old blues,” reggae artists Johnny Osbourne and Jacob Miller, Eazy-E, and the Butthole Surfers. He’s also working on songs for the project with a longtime collaborator, producer Jon Joseph, who’s been tracking technical details of Sublime’s past releases in a notebook.
“We’ve all taken our turns adding to it,” Nowell says. “And he’s the real scholar, you know, poring through not only every release, but every bootleg, every tape, every anything that Sublime has ever done. He’s tracking every single chord progression, vocal melody, lyrical content and themes and compiling a list. It’s like a spell book…. We try to use this big Venn diagram that has all of the elements of every different multi-genre thing. And we try to stay in the center of this Venn diagram to maintain a certain authenticity.”
He envisions starting with a single or two, and continuing towards the full album as long as the reception is positive. “If it feels threatening and lame and just not a cool thing to do, we probably won’t continue onwards,” he says. “But if there’s even a little bit of interest and it seems like we’re doing our job right and respecting that legacy, then of course, making music is what we want to do. It’s Bud and Eric’s job, man. It’s what they know how to do.”
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Meanwhile, a long-planned Sublime biopic appears to be moving forward, with Riverdale star KJ Apa “pretty much confirmed” to be playing Bradley Nowell, according to Jakob. “It looks like there’s some interest and some funding and it looks like it’s gonna happen,” says Jakob, who is in touch with Apa, and is reviewing the script for authenticity. “You don’t want your biopic to be too cringey. It’s easy for that to go down that route. But I think we got the right minds working on the piece.”
As he works on new Sublime music, Jakob is deeply aware of the weight of history. “When a beloved band from the Nineties comes back after 30 years and releases a new record, you’re never going to win,” he says. “You can’t compete with mythology. The myth will win out every time . So all we can do is try to create a tributary to this deific fucking figure that we’ve seen from back in the day.… Oftentimes the biggest challenge for me is that you have this ever-present sense that you’re sneaking into the realm of gods and stealing their statues. We don’t want to profane the works of God here. We just want to exalt them.”
