The Longest Goodbye: Sublime's First New Album in 30 Years Is an Epilogue, Not a Reboot

The most Long Beach thing that happened this summer didn't happen on a stage — it happened on June 12, when Atlantic Records released Until the Sun Explodes, the first new Sublime studio album in three decades. Let that sit. The band that soundtracked every backyard, every lowrider, every 4/20 from Belmont Shore to the 710 finally made another record.

Here's the part that matters, and the part that's easy to get wrong: this isn't a nostalgia cash-grab with a hologram. Fronting the band is Jakob Nowell — son of the late Bradley Nowell, whose 1996 overdose ended the original run just as the self-titled album made them famous. The classic rhythm section is intact: Bud Gaugh on drums, Eric Wilson on bass, the two men who were there at the start in 1988. Guests reportedly include H.R. of Bad Brains, Fletcher Dragge of Pennywise, and G. Love — a guest list that reads like a family tree of the sound Sublime borrowed and rebuilt.

What keeps it from feeling like a stunt is how carefully Jakob has framed the thing. "The last Sublime record that will ever be made is Self-Titled," he told press around the release. "Until the Sun Explodes, the album, is an epilogue." An epilogue — not a sequel, not a reboot. That's an unusually honest way to release a record with this much commercial gravity behind it, and it's the reason the album lands as tribute rather than trespass.

The context is impossible to separate from geography. Sublime is the ur-Long Beach band, the group that made the specific alchemy of this coast — reggae, punk, hip-hop, dub, and sunburn — legible to the rest of the country. Every ska-punk kid at this month's Warped Tour and every reggae-rock act on the waterfront amphitheater's summer bill owes something to the template these three built in a city that the industry mostly ignored.

If there's a frustration for hometown fans, it's the calendar. The band spent the spring on the road — a 30th-anniversary Red Rocks stand in April, festival dates scattered across the country into summer — but as of this writing there's no announced Southern California headline show tied to the album. For a record this rooted in a single ZIP code, the absence of a hometown date stings a little.

Still. Thirty years is a long time to wait for a coda. Play it loud, on a porch, facing the water. That's what it's for.

Sources: Sublime Announces Their First New Album in 30 Years — Digital Music News; Sublime Signs With Atlantic Records, New Album and Tour Coming This Year — Variety