Why Did Iconic ’90s Rock Band No Doubt Break Up? Real Reason

With hits like “Don’t Speak,” “Just a Girl,” “Hey Baby,” and “Spiderwebs” among their most recognizable repertoire, it’s hard to believe that No Doubt ever broke up — because who doesn’t know every word to all of those songs?

But the group that featured Gwen Stefani as the lead singer stopped performing together circa 2004 after rising to the highest ranks of celebrity in the late 1990s. What happened? Read on for details.

As No Doubt fans know, the band, which formed in the 1980s in California, was made up of singer Gwen Stefani, guitarist Tom Dumont, bassist Tony Kanal, and drummer Adrian Young.

The band won Grammys and rose to the top of the charts with mega-hit songs, with their most successful album being “Tragic Kingdom” released in 1996.

However, according to Pitchfork, 2004 would mark No Doubt’s last performance as a band — until 2008, when they briefly reunited for the album basically no one heard, “Push and Shove.”

From there, they would perform sporadically, but of course, Gwen became a huge solo star and No Doubt faded into the past as a nostalgic memory.

It turns out that according to Us Weekly, No Doubt didn’t necessarily break up, but they moved on to do other things, with the most notable example being Gwen’s prolific album “Love. Angel. Music. Baby.”

By the time the band got back together to work on a new project, the magic that made No Doubt so popular was gone.

“‘Push And Shove,’ the title actually makes so much sense to the songs. That whole time period was just a really hard time. Everything was like we were in molasses and nothing was coming easy,” Gwen told Fault in 2023.

She went on to confess in part, “I feel that record was where No Doubt was most confused. We just had come back together, and we wanted to do it so badly, but for me, I was completely depleted from my world tour and giving birth.”

Indeed, Gwen is a mom to three boys: Kingston born in 2006, Zuma born in 2008, and Apollo, born in 2014. Their dad is the singer’s ex-husband, former Bush frontman Gavin Rossdale. As fans are well aware, she has since gotten remarried to Blake Shelton.