Jakob Nowell releases a new anthem of insouciance dubbed ‘2 Hours Ago’ from his solo project Jakobs Castle – set to release its galvanizing debut album ENTER: THE CASTLE on April 12 via Epitaph Records.
‘2 Hours Ago’
The hyperpop-adjacent song echoes nostalgia for the don’t-give-a-fuck attitude of 90s punk rock, but filtered through Nowell’s casual, irreverent musicality.
“What I think is cool about punk rock music wasn’t just the sounds, it was the ideal, the realness. And there’s nothing more real than kids making insane-sounding music in their bedrooms nowadays,” Nowell explains. “I wanted to capture that spirit, that DIYness, and mold it into a song that has genuine heart behind it.”
On the surface, the song’s lyrics offer a lesson in the art of being unbothered – written about a drunken girlfriend that just couldn’t get her act together. But digging deeper, Jakobs Castle lowers the drawbridge into the mind of an intelligent, wildly interesting songwriter.
Created with producer and co-collaborator Jon Joseph (Børns, Caroline Rose), Nowell describes each song on ENTER: THE CASTLE like an experiment. He’s not chasing trends or trying to make music that fits into a mold. Jakobs Castle songs are a weird amalgamation of Nowell’s favorite, often contrary, things – like transforming Japanese instruments into guitar-sounding upstrokes or turning a melody from a weird piece of emo-rap reverb. “The goal of the project is infiltration. I want to infiltrate different scenes and make very weird music that is also palatable,” he said.
Growing up in Southern California, the only child of Bradley Nowell and progeny of one of the most influential bands of the 90s in Sublime, Jakob Nowell never knew his father, who passed away of a drug overdose when he was just 11 months old. The chaotic household of his youth subjected Nowell to a party lifestyle at a young age. In the absence of normal parentage while growing up in the late 90s and early 2000s, his caretaker became the internet and its bubbling subcultures.
“For a long time I felt really alone and art became a form of escapism,” Jakob Nowell explains. “I would connect with a piece of media, and it was like I found my own community of like-minded weirdos that understood. Jakobs Castle is my way of sending out my own weak single into the void. If even one person understands the references and feels a connection, my work is complete.”
Now a 28-year-old, charismatic young man, Jakob Nowell has entered into a new era on his own personal and professional journey – one of acceptance and reverence for the past while forging his own path, in his own way. After signing with Epitaph Records in summer 2023, Jakobs Castle released ‘Time Traveler,’ which broke into the top 50 songs on Alternative Radio charts and garnered airplay from Alt Nation on Sirius XM Radio. In the months that followed, Jakobs Castle continued to drip new music from its forthcoming debut with additional singles ‘Lights Out’ and most recently ‘Catch Me,’ which earned spins from KROQ in Los Angeles.
In addition to his solo work with Jakobs Castle, news broke in January that original Sublime band members Eric Wilson and Bud Gaugh will reunite with Jakob Nowell as the frontman of Sublime at Coachella Music Festival. Furthermore, now more than six years sober himself, Jakob Nowell is a board member of The Nowell Family Foundation, a nonprofit offering addiction recovery services to the music community with a residential recovery facility dubbed Bradley’s House.
“The only way I’m ever going to stand on my own two feet as an artist is not by completely ignoring [Sublime] and also not by completely embracing it,” he told his hometown paper, the Long Beach Post. “It lies somewhere in the middle, I think – that middle path of authenticity.”
ENTER: THE CASTLE Tracklisting
- Supervillain
- Crazy Friends
- Lights Out
- Sadness Is…
- My Machine
- Close Enough
- Motel Radio
- Catch Me
- Twenty-One Miles
- Ashlyn
- 2 Hours Ago
- Time Traveler
- Emodub
- It’s Not Me…It’s You
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