I remember those years in the second half of the nineties, when MTV started putting on rotation videos from bands that shaped my life, not just the music I grew up with. Rancid, The Offspring, Pennywise, Millencolin fed the punkest part of me, but in those same years we were also living the boom of ska revival and ska punk: The Bosstones, Reel Big Fish, Save Ferris, Goldfinger were all getting regular airplay. I was a punk kid, and I had one of the luckiest setups a teenager could have: in the afternoon, my parents were at work and I was home alone every day. I was good at school, homework didn’t take long, and I could spend hours playing guitar and drums over the videos I recorded from MTV.
I also remember the first time I saw the video for Santeria. Oversaturated colors, two guys in cowboy disguise with a dalmatian doing weird things on a western set, and a phantom guitarist appearing randomly. And still, one of the catchiest songs I had ever heard. That was a defining moment: it showed me you don’t need big horns or a full band skanking on stage to make a ska song work. That was enough to send me digging into that scene, where I found a lot more to love, but that was the moment I fell for Sublime. I didn’t know yet their singer was already gone. When I found out he’d died, andI realized that I would never see this record played live by the people who made it, it was a shock. Sublime without Bradley is like Nirvana without Kurt. You can’t go on, it’s not the same thing.
Sublime came out on July 30, 1996, two months after Bradley Nowell died of a heroin overdose. The album was recorded mostly at Willie Nelson’s Pedernales Studio, with Paul Leary of the Butthole Surfers behind the desk. Accounts from those sessions describe total chaos, with people checking the bathroom to make sure Nowell was still breathing. The record eventually came out, but the band that made it didn’t exist anymore by the time anyone could hear it. Eric Wilson and Bud Gaugh built one of the best rhythm sections ska has ever had, loose and locked at the same time, while the guitars sit perfectly between clean and distorted tones. This record goes everywhere, stylistically: hip hop, reggae, punk, straight pop, all held together by Bradley Nowell’s natural instinct for melody. It still sounds modern in 2026, which very few records from 1996 can say.
I’ve spent more hours with this album than with any other record across my life. There’s a certain kind of magic to it: it has a song for every mood I’ve ever been in. You can wake up one day and need the mellow atmosphere of What I Got, the next day you want the urgency of Same in the End, another day you just close your eyes and let April 29, 1992 (Miami) dub vibes carry you away. But above all, this record holds one of the most beautiful anthems ska ever produced. Santeria is my favorite song ever, full stop. It’s been on every mix I’ve made for every girlfriend I’ve had for 2 decades, and it’s tied to some of the dearest memories I have of my youth.
There’s a night in Edinburgh of which I still remember every detail. I’d gone to visit my friend A., who was on Erasmus there, and the plan was to backpack up to Loch Ness together. After five days he and the others turned back. I kept going alone, got caught in the rain, came down with a fever, and an old woman somewhere along the way gave me a plate of soup like it was the most normal thing in the world. I got back two days later, still half sick, but it was a night for celebrating since I was leaving soon, and someone put a guitar in my hands and myself on a stage in front of a room full of Erasmus students and drunken Scottish dudes in every direction. I felt like playing Santeria even though I was sure nobody in that bar would know this song. Within a few bars, the whole room was singing it louder than I was, and my voice just disappeared into theirs.
There was another A., a different friend, and his black Ford Fiesta. Twenty years old, windows down, cigarettes, screaming Santeria at full volume down some road that led nowhere in particular. One of those nights spent driving with no destination, just navigating the waves of brotherhood and the pleasure of sharing the love for the same music with your best friend. And there was Sarajevo, early 2000s, a Scout trip, playing that same song for a group of kids in the middle of a city still visibly wrecked by a war that had ended only a few years before. All the kids were laughing and dancing and screaming at a song without understanding a single word of it. Some songs travel to places you’d never expect.
I’ve thought about Bradley Nowell more than is normal for someone I never met. There’s a photo of him playing guitar with Jakob, his son, as a newborn, and I’ve held that image in my head and on a frame on my bedroom wall for years without really being able to say why. Maybe I was just dreaming about singing songs to my future sons. My daughter is seven now, and this is one of the very few records of mine she accepts to listen. I suspect she thinks it’s her father’s band. I haven’t corrected her.
And then this year, thirty years almost to the point, Sublime enrolled Jakob Nowell and released Until the Sun Explodes with the same voice his father had. Not similar. The same instrument, passed down whole. I was speechless the first time I listened to this record, the mix of emotions I had been accumulating for 30 years finally released, and I was really close to tears. This record is a real contender for my album of the year, and it feels like the strangest thing this whole story could have done with itself.
Thirty years since a record came out that its own band could never play. My daughter doesn’t know that, she just knows it has a song she loves, and thinks it’s her father’s.
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