As Sublime continue carving out their next chapter — including the newly completed album Until the Sun Explodes — frontman Jakob Nowell is thinking just as hard about the future of live music as he is about the band’s legacy. That vision is beginning to take shape in Sublime Fest, a new multi-city festival Nowell is helping build from the ground up — one that aims to challenge the increasingly formulaic festival landscape.
“It’s been interesting,” Nowell says of the process. “Finding the bands, the locations and stuff like that. Really, we have an amazing management team. They do most of the hard work and the heavy lifting, honestly. So we get to do the fun stuff.”
That “fun stuff” includes shaping the personality of a festival he hopes will feel less like a brand extension and more like a creative ecosystem. “You just hope that you create something fun that people can come to and make memories at,” he explains. “Really hoping that the lineup will shape out to be multi-genre, interesting, alternative shit. No one needs another just reggae fest or something like that. There’s so many good ones out there.”
For Nowell, who’s grown up on festival stages, Sublime Fest is also a reaction to the pitfalls he’s witnessed firsthand. “I think festivals oftentimes have a lot of inherent issues,” he says, describing the “fucking bell curve” effect where communication breaks down as events get bigger. “It’s no one’s fault really at the end of the day, because no one knows what the fuck they’re supposed to be doing.” His solution? “Keeping it at an attainable level… just a cool, small midsize festival.”
The lineup philosophy reflects that ethos. Big draws — including Sublime — are part of the equation, but they’re only the gateway. “That’s more like the trap that I want to bait people with,” he admits with a laugh. “Then while they’re there and they’ve got nothing else to do in between sets, go check out one of these new and up-and-coming bands. You might be on the ground level of what is hopefully a new movement of alternative loud guitar music.”
That movement is already brewing in Southern California, where Nowell and his SVN/BVRNT Records collective are producing rising acts like Untitled. “I look for anger and dissatisfaction,” he says of the younger bands he’s championing. “I think music is supposed to make us want to fight and fuck and feel. Anybody who’s not a little bit dissatisfied with something in their life probably has no business making music.”
Sublime Fest’s multi-genre curation — punk, reggae, hip-hop, harder rock — intentionally mirrors the DNA that made Sublime resonate in the first place. “I think all that music shares something in common,” Nowell says. “Look no further than Sublime to see how they blended all those styles.”
Ultimately, Sublime Fest isn’t about recreating the past — it’s about passing the torch. “What’s exciting to me about festivals like Warped Tour from back in the day… you had a bunch of big-ticket names,” he says. “But you also discovered something new.”
If Nowell has his way, Sublime Fest
won’t just be another stop on the summer circuit — it’ll be a launchpad. And maybe, if the crowd takes the bait, the birthplace of the next loud, unruly chapter in alternative music.
Watch the Full Interview with Jakob Nowell:
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