It was mere hours before No Doubt kicked off their residency at Las Vegas’ Sphere when the emotional weight of the moment struck bassist Tony Kanal. “I had a good cry at soundcheck,” he tells Variety of their Wednesday night performance, the first of 18 shows at the state-of-the-art venue through the end of May. “I’m glad I got that out of the way before the show, because I would have probably started losing it on stage.”
Along with his bandmates — lead singer Gwen Stefani, guitarist Tom Dumont and drummer Adrian Young, plus longtime horn/keyboard players Stephen Bradley and Gabrial McNair — Kanal brought the group’s vision to life across the two-hour show, a retrospective that traces No Doubt‘s scrappy early years to its rise as a global phenomenon.
The performance was the culmination of discussions that firmed up in September 2025, when the band agreed to a residency and set off on a sprint to assemble a four-act spectacle that captured the grit and grind of the group’s ascent. “Every waking moment over the past eight months was about this show,” he says. “So when you’re finally doing the first show, it’s the culmination of all this work and incredibly talented people that we got to work with. You’re about to share it with the world. And it’s overwhelming. You can’t really grasp how time went by because those eight months went so fast, and we were so busy. It was just joyous.”
For No Doubt, the Sphere residency comes in the wake of a long period of relative dormancy. The SoCal band last put out an album in 2012 (“Push and Shove”), and performances have been generally sporadic since, save for some festival dates over the years. But it was with the quartet’s pair of Coachella sets in 2024 that the group reaffirmed its standing as one of pop’s most enduring touchstones, a band that had cross-generational appeal with the same charisma and spark they’ve shown since forming in 1986.
Following No Doubt’s inaugural Sphere performance, Kanal explains why they framed the show as a love letter to their journey as a band, why they didn’t tour after their Coachella shows and, of course, whether they’ll ever head back to the studio to record new music.
Eight months is pretty quick to put this together. How did you approach assembling it — was it idea first, execution next?
First of all, eight months is what we were told was the bare minimum of putting this together. So we knew we had our work cut out for us. But we were really fortunate to work with Baz Halpin and his team at Silent House Productions. We’ve worked with Baz before, he did our 2009 tour, and Baz has already done a few shows at the Sphere, so he’s familiar with the venue. That helped start the process. But one of the big differences about putting this show together versus even Coachella a couple of years ago is that you have to decide on a set list months ago. And that’s a weird thing because usually you can mix it up. You don’t really have that opportunity [here] because so much of the content has to be created months ago. So that was a big difference.
Artists tend to go to Vegas for the greatest hits show. That was partly what this was, but the other part was deeper cuts, fan favorites. Obviously, the show is an ode to No Doubt’s journey, but why did you take that approach?
I mean, that’s exactly what it was. After going back and forth on what this show is going to be, it ended up being a trip, taking people on the journey of our band. That’s what we wanted it to be, a culmination of everything that we’ve worked on. It just came down to that. And once we knew that was the gist of what we were putting together, it all started falling into place. And it was Baz’s idea to separate the show into four acts and then do the interstitials where we’re explaining things along the way.
Look, here’s the thing. We’ve been a band for a long time. We took almost a decade off from playing and doing anything together between the last shows in 2015 and then Coachella in 2024. But we’ve done a lot as a band. So the things that get us collectively excited the most are new things and challenges. And that’s what this was. We wanted to dig a little deeper and do some tracks that people weren’t expecting to hear. It was also, how do you tell the story, and what songs do all four of us want to play? So there are all these different filters that songs need to go through to get to the final setlist.
The Sphere is so overwhelming, and the audience’s eye is mainly drawn to the visuals on the screens because they’re towering. So when you’re planning the show, are you conscious of the fact that all eyes are going to be on the screens for a lot of it as opposed to the band playing live?
Absolutely. I’ve seen shows at the Sphere and sometimes you get so involved in watching the content that you actually forget there’s a live artist playing on the stage. It’s a tricky thing to find that balance. And I feel like we did. We tried to thread that needle and find that balance, so you come away getting the full Sphere experience. But at the same time, you don’t miss the fact that you’re seeing No Doubt live, which for a lot of people is the most important thing.
The show is strung along by archival content. Even when you walk in, the screen is covered in fliers of shows from 1987 and 1989, and the video vignettes shown throughout the performance were early footage. How much archival digging was done for this?
Let me give full credit to our friend Eric Keyes, who has been with us since the beginning. He’s the band’s documentarian and archivist. He has so much footage and is so generous with his time, putting all this stuff together for us. With the Vibee experience, [an immersive pop-up at the Venetian’s Summit Showroom], he put together four separate video packages. We did a nod to Fender’s Ballroom, which is a venue we used to play in Long Beach in ’87 and ’88. And then if you go to the Beacon Street House, there’s a screen that shows our van tours in 1992, and there’s also a big projection screen that shows behind-the-scenes stuff. And then there’s a screen in another part of the exhibit that shows more later-day footage. And so Eric was the person who put that stuff together for us. He’s become such an important part of our story. You can literally go, “Eric, what was the time when this happened outside of the van?” And he goes, “Oh yeah, let me go find that for you.” We’re so fortunate to have this great friend as part of this, putting this creative content together.
One of the reasons fans have invested in No Doubt is because you share such personal experiences in your music and visuals. You make it part of the narrative. What’s it like for you to still be looking back on these trials and tribulations that you’ve gone through and putting them front and center time and again?
There’s always been this underlying feeling of not trying to take ourselves too seriously. I was thinking, when we were doing interviews, you’re doing like 10 a day, right? You’re on press junkets or you’re on tour and you’ve got hours and hours of interviews before we even go to sound check. You almost get giddy, like you’re jetlagged in some places and saying the same shit over and over again. We would just take it to the next level. We would do absurd things and say silly things to entertain each other. And that’s kind of our dynamic internally. Like, don’t take things too seriously. So we’re just doing what we’ve always done. We’re wearing our hearts on our sleeves and we’re sharing with people the trials and tribulations and victories and joys that we’ve experienced together for almost four decades now.
A lot of people said that a tour right after Coachella would have made the most sense, but you held off until this residency.
Those Coachella shows were really monumental for us. We didn’t know what to expect. It’s a young audience, and we didn’t know how they were going to react to us. And it was just overwhelmingly, incredibly joyous and positive and beautiful. They became super important milestones in the history of the band. And then there were discussions about what to do next. And just like with any family, there are lots of different opinions. It wasn’t until the Sphere conversation started that all four of us were on the same page. Just like with everything, it’s got to be all four of us agreeing to do it. As you can imagine, there are very strong opinions in our band. And so this was the thing that happened. We take it day by day. We don’t try to plan too far in the future. If there’s anything we’ve learned, it’s that we don’t know what’s going to happen next.
People were anticipating a new song in the mix at the Sphere show. Was there a conversation about putting a new song in or recording new music for it?
That conversation always comes back to, are we on the same page about what we’d want to do? And I think until we get to that place, we would hold off until we’re all on the same creative page about creating new music. I don’t want to say it’ll never happen, but I think for us, we’d like to keep the bar high. So if there was ever a conversation about new music, we’d have to all be in agreement on how we’re approaching that. And that hasn’t been part of this conversation yet. Right now, it’s obviously focusing on the Sphere shows.
Are there any plans to factor in a surprise during the Sphere shows, maybe put in a different song here and there, or is this pretty static?
The way the technology works at the Sphere, you have to stick to it. I think there’s gonna be surprises as far as how we perform songs and what we do in between songs. But right now we’re just focusing on making sure the show goes off just smoothly.
The show is about legacy, if you want to put it in a metaphorical, bigger picture way. How much does No Doubt’s legacy weigh on your mind these days?
It weighs on me a lot because it’s been every part of my waking life for the last eight months. When I say eight months, I mean eight months from when we decided we’re doing it. There was a good year of discussions before that. So right now, No Doubt is everything that I’m eating, living and breathing. It’s a beautiful place to be. My kids are coming in a few hours [for the second show]. I’m so excited. When they show up here at the hotel, we’re all going to go over together and their minds are going to be blown. I have a 15-year-old daughter and a 12-year-old daughter. There’s something so rewarding about watching them experience something for the first time, something so big and joyous and beautiful and that’s what I’m excited about today. And my mom and dad came [to the first night], my dad’s in 91. He’s been coming to the show since ’87. So he was there, they’re coming again tonight. That stuff is just next level.
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