Sublime’s ‘Santeria’ Joins Spotify’s Billions Club
With the band back in action, their 1996 smash has reached one billion plays on the streaming platform.
You might have needed a crystal ball to foresee a service like Spotify back in 1996, when Sublime recorded their self-titled LP. But nearly three decades later, “Santeria,” one of that album’s biggest hits, has become a fixture on the streaming platform. As of this week, the song has joined Billions Club, having racked up more than one billion plays on Spotify alone. It’s Sublime’s first song to reach that milestone.
“Santeria” was a No. 3 alternative radio hit and an MTV fixture in the mid-1990s, when Sublime emerged as one of the decade’s defining albums. Released in the wake of frontman Bradley Nowell’s untimely death, the Long Beach ska-punk trio’s major-label debut spun off hits like “What I Got,” “Wrong Way,” and “Doin’ Time,” later covered by Lana Del Rey. “The trio’s bright, wired bounce and the shell-game shuffle of funk beats, snappy Jamaican rhythms and mosh-pit, shout-it-out choruses in Nowell’s writing – that’s the stuff of a band with great promise and the confidence to make good on it,” raved Rolling Stone upon the album’s release.
In the streaming era, “Santeria” has endured as arguably the band’s most popular track, in part through its inclusion in video games such as Guitar Hero World Tour, Rock Band 3, and Rocksmith 2014. Like most of the album, it was produced by the Butthole Surfers’ Paul Leary. Sublime built “Santeria” out of the chords and guitar solo from a previous song, “Lincoln Highway Dub,” which featured on their prior album, 1994’s Robbin’ the Hood, infusing that framework with a vivid new lyrical narrative from Nowell.
Sublime’s first entry into the Billions Club comes just months after the release of “Ensenada,” the reactivated band’s new chart-topping single. Returning Sublime to No. 1 on the Billboard Alternative Airplay chart for the first time since “What I Got” in 1996, the track is taken from a forthcoming album—the band’s first since Bradley’s son Jakob Nowell took over lead vocal and guitar duties, joining founding members Eric Wilson and Bud Gaugh.
