Tony Kanal, Tom Dumont, and Adrian Young—a.k.a., the guys who’ve spent the last 25 years of their professional careers as “the dudes in No Doubt who aren’t Gwen Stefani”—have just announced a new side project, one which looks, strangely, a whole heck of a lot like No Doubt. In fact, if we’re going to get nitpicky, the only major difference between the new, so-far-unnamed “supergroup” and the long-running ska-pop-punk-rock band is their lead singers, with AFI’s Davey Havok kinda, sorta taking the place of Gwen Stefani, leading one to wonder whether the queen of the breakout solo act has now been replaced in the band that made her famous.
To be fair, Stefani has been keeping herself pretty busy in the years since 2012’s Push And Shove; she joined the cast of NBC’s The Voice, signed on to play one of the Trolls, put in time on her upcoming solo album (This Is What The Truth Feels Like), and did some sort of weird dog fashion show. To be even more fair, though, very little of that time (outside of a few festival performances) was spent with No Doubt, and sometimes a band just gets lonely.
Hence the collaboration with Havok, presumably, whose own band has been operating at a slower pace—give or take a Burials here or there—for the last few years. That’s apparently given him plenty of time to bond with his new step-guitarist, bassist, and drummer, with the new band—which, again, is definitely not No Doubt with a new singer—announcing that it’s already completed its first album. There’s no word yet, though, on when Do Noubt’s new music is likely to show up in stores.