No Doubt: Steady Mettle.

Rock Steady is in stores now.

In the very beginning Eric Stefani wrote his first song, Stick It In The Hole, about a pencil sharpener - and forced sister Gwen to sing-a-long. Gwen was more interested in The Sound Of Music. A few years pass and it's December 1986 when John Spence - who will commit suicide a year later - forms a 2 Tone ska group, No Doubt, with Eric - who forces Gwen to sing backing vocals. She, some say in revenge, cites Madness, Kermit the Frog, Julie Andrews and Fishbone's Angelo Moore as her heroes.

A decade later, in December 1996, the Anaheim, Orange County, quartet went to #1 on Billboard with the album Tragic Kingdom, that had been out – and mostly struggling - for 14 months. It stayed on top for nine weeks, smashed charts worldwide and has now sold a staggering 12 million copies; Don't Speak and Just A Girl became inescapable radio and video anthems. For a year and a few manic months there, No Doubt were the biggest band in the world. What happened?

“Yeah, what happened,” guitarist Tom Dumont muses. “That's what we were all saying. All the stuff that came with Tragic Kingdom really threw us for a while. Longer than we probably realised. There's no way you can prepare yourself for the impact of a record like Tragic Kingdom that sells so many copies. Until that point in time we were just this little band from Orange County who nobody had even heard of and then we were suddenly on top of the charts and everybody wanted to know about us, all over the world.”

Spin declared the band ‘the last American New Wave Group’ in its November 1996 cover story. Gwen's face and belly button got top billing while the boys in the band - Kanal, Dumont and Adrian Young - were relegated to the Table Of Contents page. The boys were cropped out of photos used for features. Dumont, making a stand, asked a Rolling Stone writer, ‘Has it got the point where we mean nothing? If Gwen doesn't speak, we mean nothing’. Gwen was by then the uncontested Queen of Pop worldwide.

“In a way you do react against that kind of pressure and those kind of situations and Return Of Saturn was just such a reaction,” Dumont says. “We made something very complex and totally different to what people expected of us. We made a record that we thought showed people we had depth and substance - which we really had anyway - and that we could be more than the fun pop band they seemed to say we were.”

Naturally enough, Return Of Saturn didn't sell anywhere near the numbers of its now famous predecessor, not that the band was worried. They'd got some stuff of their proverbial chests. Just two years later they've returned with Rock Steady, easily their best album, on which a remarkably relaxed and chilled band embraces dancehall reggae, dub and some classic ND pop/rock. With production from the legendary Jamaican superstars Sly & Robbie and fellow Kingston dancehall fave Lady Saw, Nellie Hooper, Prince, the Neptunes, William Orbit and The Cars' Ric Ocasek, Rock Steady is a particularly palatable brew of infectious groove-laden pop music that's so grown up.

Dumont laughs. “Yeah, I guess we are all grown up now aren't we. I think Rock Steady does tie up all the sounds on the previous albums but it's also the most relaxed we've been in a while. We got back to our roots but the best thing was - despite working with all these great people - that the songs are basically how we originally demoed them. There's a lot of big name producers on this album but the fact is they liked what we had done and just tweaked and added to the songs rather than getting us to rerecord or rework them. Thanks to advances in studio technology we literally recorded much of this new album in our living room.”

Simply, No Doubt dramatically changed the way they worked. The band's three songwriters, Stefani, Kanal and Dumont, began working at the latter's home studio in early January. Their aim: to write and record a new song every day. It worked. Stefani - a notorious, self-admitted, slow writer - responded to the challenge and the band kept the vibe free and uncomplicated by going out and dancing the nights away in the local clubs.

“I think I can take some credit for what happened with this album,” Dumont says. “Early in the piece I said 'Let's not do it when we don't feel like it. Let's not just go in and write even if we don't feel like writing. There's no point'. I wanted us to go back to doing it the way we used to - enjoying writing and recording. Having fun. And that's what we did. It was just like write it right now, record it, and it's done.”