Sublime is working on a new album with the son of the band’s late frontman.
The hugely influential Long Beach ska-punk trio — whose singer Bradley Nowell died in 1996 — said Wednesday that it’s writing and recording songs with Nowell’s 29-year-old son Jakob, who stepped into his father’s role with Sublime in late 2023. The band is working with producers Travis Barker (of Blink-182) and John Feldmann and plans to release the LP’s first single this summer.
“I grew up on Sublime,” Barker said in a statement, adding that the band’s 1992 album “40 Oz. to Freedom” “changed the way I listened to music.” Feldmann, known for his work with pop-punk acts including Good Charlotte and 5 Seconds of Summer, said working with Sublime “has been a highlight of my life.”
After performing with Sublime for the first time in public at a benefit concert for H.R. of the pioneering hardcore Bad Brains, Jakob Nowell fronted the band last year at Coachella then went on to play a series of festival dates with drummer Bud Gaugh and bassist Eric Wilson, who formed Sublime with Bradley Nowell in the late ’80s. Bradley Nowell’s death from an accidental heroin overdose came just two months before the release of the band’s first major-label album. Yet that self-titled LP went on to become a quintuple-platinum smash, spawning late-’90s alt-rock radio staples like “What I Got,” “Santeria” and “Wrong Way.”
After Nowell’s death, Gaugh and Wilson played together in the Long Beach Dub Allstars; in 2009, the two drafted the singer and guitarist Rome Ramirez to perform Sublime’s music under the name Sublime with Rome.
Last year, Jakob Nowell told The Times that people had pressured him for years to play with his dad’s former bandmates but that he’d always been reluctant, in part because he had his own musical interests and in part because of his complicated relationship with his father’s memory. He changed his mind after a “spiritual pilgrimage,” as he put it, to the theater in Petaluma where Bradley Nowell played his final gig.
Sublime has tour dates scheduled this summer including a May 3 stop at the BeachLife festival in Redondo Beach.
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