A two-year silence after the resounding success of a double platinum album and a highly touted two-year tour and people were beginning to have doubts that they were ever going to hear from No Doubt again.
After all, the Californian band has had its share of trials and tribulations: a suicide (guitarist John Spence), a broken romance between two of its members (Gwen Stefani and Tony Kanal) and the departure of the lead songwriter (Eric Stefani). All that plus newfound fame might just have hammered in the final nail.
'Definitely not,' says drummer Adrian Young from Orange County, California, recently. 'We've been working consistently for two years and recorded almost two albums worth of material.' Some of the results can been heard in Return To Saturn, released worldwide this week, while others may just make a B-side album or another collection similar to their Beacon Street Collection.
'We've been putting a lot into this; we've not been sitting around on our success. If any of the songs didn't sound right, we'd go back and re-record the song until we felt we had something,' says Young.
Whether or not Return To Saturn will match the more than six million copies sold for their 1995 hit album Tragic Kingdom remains to be seen but Young says that the band isn't really holding its breath.
'It's unrealistic for us to think that we could do those kinds of numbers again, way unrealistic. We won't be disappointed if it doesn't do what Tragic Kingdom did. It's possible but highly unlikely,' he added.
Return To Saturn was originally scheduled for release last November but the quest for the right songs had set it back almost five months.
