It’s natural that Jakob Nowell might not want to be told this. If that’s the case, he handles it gracefully, humbly accepting the compliment, but not dwelling on it. To dwell on it one way or another—agreeing or downplaying—might seem like a lose-lose to him. Either he comes off as cocky or falsely modest. That, and there’s the fact that it’s normal for anyone to get a little sick of people telling them they look/sound/act so much like their parents.
And Jakob Nowell isn’t trying to be like his father.
That comes with a mountain of expectations, some positive, some negative, that he is, honestly, quite nervous about living up to.
Which is interesting because, you know, he sounds just like him.
Sublime is one of those bands that, for a while, seemed more mythological than human—a logo on a T-shirt or sticker—more than an actual band. That’s because, for a long time, it wasn’t an active band. Bradley Nowell, the almost legendary face and voice of one of Long Beach’s greatest ever exports—which says a lot in a town with a port that big—passed away in 1996, two months before the band’s self-titled, third studio album’s release and songs like “Santeria,” “What I Got,” and “Wrong Way” put them on the map when he wasn’t around to see it.
Jakob was 11 months old.
After that, Sublime was prevalent on airwaves and at chill functions, but aside from a few one-offs, collaborations with surviving members and friends, and rarities releases, it wasn’t until 2009 when the band really became anything resembling what it once was, enlisting singer/guitarist Rome Ramirez as Sublime with Rome. It was pretty close. It was probably as close as a lot of fans thought they could get without the aid of what then would have probably been a hologram, or today through the use of AI. Yuck.
Sublime in 1995 (Credit: Steve Eichner/WireImage)
That is, until Jakob Nowell came into the fold.
It started again just as a one-off, a fundraiser for HR of Bad Brains. But Jakob, along with the original rhythm section of Bud Gaugh and Eric Wilson (whom he refers to as his “uncles”), thought it was fun enough to keep thinking about.
Then things got bigger, quick, with an opportunity to play at Coachella in 2024. And it was there in the desert that Nowell was handed his father’s guitar to play—the same guitar he was pictured next to as an infant, his father the same age that Jakob is now. It could’ve been another one-off, but it worked just too well to not pursue further, leading up to the three getting back into the studio together and writing music as Sublime, with a new album on the way later this year.
It’s all just too perfect, at least from the outsider point of view. Jakob sounds just like Bradley, he has the right name, he has the right look, he knows where the band came from. What about it wouldn’t be perfect?
To look deeper, though, is to remember that Jakob is a young adult who lost a parent at a young age. There’s a lifetime of experiences and relationships to this music that his father left behind when he passed away, and it isn’t as simple as throwing the guitar on and ripping into “40 oz. to Freedom” like it’s karaoke. Just because the music is upbeat doesn’t mean there aren’t scars attached.
“It’s very complicated emotions that you feel when doing stuff like this,” he says. He’s shirtless, as he seems to be in every video that exists of him playing with Sublime. He’s in the studio in San Pedro, California, putting the finishing touches on the upcoming Sublime release, adding voicemails to add some bona fide Long Beach flavor to the record, just like his dad and “uncles” had back in the day. He’s restless, moving around the room, sometimes getting sidetracked mid-sentence to joke around with his friends, chastising them for using the bathroom without lighting palo santo, or complimenting them on an instrumental melody they’re working on.
Sublime in 1995 at Asbury Park Boardwalk in Asbury Park, New Jersey. (Credit: Steve Eichner/WireImage)
He’s having a lot of fun right now, as in today. Maybe it’s because the album is just about done and the pressure is waning. And he’s certainly having fun on stage. But he is not carefree about this whole thing, or resting on his last name as some birthright to take the job. It’s the opposite, really. He’s careful to never call it “my band.” There’s connection and love for it, but you can tell he’s treading very carefully to not act like he’s owed anything, or that his situation is more tragic than any others.
“When I first started playing with my dad’s band, oh, dude, I felt this constant feeling of stress and anxiety, to the point where I couldn’t even enjoy playing these big shows,” he says. “There’s imposter syndrome, one, and then there’s the ‘I don’t deserve this,’ two, and then there’s the ‘Someone else would be better at this,’ or ‘Is this even what my dad would have wanted?’”
If there’s one human being on earth that deserves this position, that the fans would want in this position, it’s Jakob Nowell, isn’t it?
I say this to him.
He agrees for a second, reluctantly, but then tosses out that, technically, Rome was the first pick.
Long story short: Sublime with Rome lasted seemingly as long as it took for Eric Wilson and Bud Gaugh to make things work with the younger Nowell. That Wilson-Gaugh-Nowell trio came together at the end of 2023 for the HR benefit. Jakob stepped in with the legendary guitar at Coachella, and Ramirez announced that he’d depart Sublime with Rome at the end of 2024, and Jakob would be stepping in full-time with new music on the way.
Eric Wilson and Bradley Nowell of Sublime perform at Wetlands Preserve nightclub in New York City in 1995. (Credit: Steve Eichner/Getty Images)
What Sublime with Rome lacked was the same thing any band trying to recreate a loss lacks: the soul of the missing piece. This is not a slam on Rome, nor is it his fault. His greatest sin was that he just wasn’t Bradley.
Jakob Nowell isn’t either, nor fully aspires to be. Because gaining perspective on your parents as people is a complicated thing. To do it in front of a crowd is brutal.
A lot of growing up is embracing the fact that your parents are human beings with their own internal lives. They had lived lives before you, and they often made mistakes. As you get older, you can see it with greater perspective and understand them as people. But, for Jakob, a lot of that came with the world thinking they knew his dad.
“When I was a kid, the way I felt about who I am and who I’m related to and the whole cosmic journey of life has changed,” he says. “It’s always going to change. But, it’s almost missing the point. I think the point is that everybody has complicated emotions about family, coming of age, coming into your own, and being fulfilled and productive. So it’s taken me the entirety of my life up until now to get to a place where I’m finally starting to feel positive feelings about it all.
“You can’t just sit there and think all day about how bummed you are that you’re not the thing you want to be, or that you have to live up to another thing. It’s just never going to get anywhere.”
“They talk about, ‘You can’t think your way into better actions, but you can act your way into better thinking’”, quoting AA. He has been sober since 2017.
Last name be damned, this was another job that he was simply auditioning for. This involved diving deep through the Sublime catalog in a way he perhaps might never have done before, listening not just for the voice and the emotions of his father, but how he sang it.
He just wanted to do a good job.
“If you’re asked to join a new project like that, this is what you’re supposed to do as a professional,” he says. “You’ve got to understand what the band’s going for, and how you can either add to it and make sure that your style is not subtracting. … I think naturally my chords are similar to my dad’s, but my approach to singing is different from his.”
He paid attention to things like vowel sounds and the occasional fluttery vibrato his dad would put on a word, evident on the new single, “Ensenada.” Pay attention to when he sings “on my mind” and draws out that last word. The way he softly sets down words like “no more.” It sounds familiar, huh? Like he said, his genetics gifted him similar vocal chords, but he had to consciously make them sing like a Sublime song, rather than something he would sing for his own bands like Jakob’s Castle.
Sublime performs on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon in 2024 (Credit: Todd Owyoung/NBC via Getty Images)
He opens up a little more about his connection to Bradley his father, not Bradley the rockstar.
“It’s when you go deep, you know, you see a lot of who a person is like,” he says. “I feel like our soul is spelled out in all of our artistic works, no matter what they are. So, you know, a lot of people’s parents die and don’t leave them shit. All they have is like a baseball cap to remember them by or whatever. So diving deep through the catalog helped me connect with my father and helped improve me as a musician or performer.”
There’s new Sublime music on the way. And it sounds like Sublime music. It’s clear Gaugh and Wilson click with their old pal’s scion. It feels right, right from the jump. It continues where they left off, the entire life that took place between the release of that self-titled album and now just adds even more richness to it.
Connection is really at the heart of this. More than figuring out the way the songs sounded, Jakob tapped into the soul of Sublime beyond the music. They were as much a Long Beach community institution as they were a band, putting the city on the map. Sublime made a record label, Skunk Records, to put out their own music and boost their friends, and now Jakob’s doing the same with his own label, Svnbvrnt. Sublime captured life for a bunch of young knuckleheads in their neck of the woods and Nowell has his own crew of musicians and friends to keep that spirit alive now.
That’s what Jakob wants to tap into more than anything.
Jakob Nowell of Sublime performs during the 2025 Boston Calling Music Festival at Harvard Athletic Complex. (Credit: Taylor Hill/Getty Images for Boston Calling)
“Once it took me long enough playing these shows and trying to build up Svnbvrnt Records to try to exalt the careers of my friends’ bands and try to shed a light on a greater group of people, I realized that our favorite music and art, and Sublime in particular, is sort of a response and a result of a scene of people in Southern California living anyways,” he says.
He nods his head toward his friends, also shirtless, noodling around on a guitar.
“The guys in there are drinking tequila and making punk rock music.”
He cares very deeply about Sublime, because Sublime is more than just the T-shirts and songs from 30-plus years ago that still resonate today. And he cares very deeply about what Sublime means to you.
“What is more important than trying to be big or get chicks and play cool shows, I think it’s more about those intense moments where someone’s hurt and you’ve gotta visit them in the hospital and everyone shows up. Or people rally together and help someone who’s down because you all met at a show together. Or you got fired from your job or broke up with your person, and all you have is that one CD or playlist. If I had a part in someone’s soundtrack to the highs and lows of their life, that’s just really special and cool to me, man.”
He sounds just like him, doesn’t he?
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