No Doubt - No Doubt

In March 1992, a horn-heavy ska band from Anaheim released a debut album into the teeth of the grunge boom and watched it sell roughly 30,000 copies. Interscope would not even fund a single, so the band put out "Trapped In A Box" themselves. This is that record: Eric Stefani's band, keyboard and songwriting both, with his younger sister Gwen still sharing the front and not yet the focal point anyone came for.

It is a manic listen. "Let's Get Back," "Get On The Ball" and "Brand New Day" are propelled by horns and third-wave energy, closer to Fishbone and the Orange County club circuit than to anything on rock radio at the time. The shadow of founding singer John Spence, who died in 1987, sits underneath it. Producer Dito Godwin recorded the album in Los Angeles after Interscope signed the band and had them redo their independent version. What resulted is an artifact of a scene that Tragic Kingdom would later obscure entirely, and it is considerably more fun than three decades of dismissal suggest.

Historically it is the necessary first chapter. The commercial failure sent the band back to their parents' garage to make The Beacon Street Collection on their own dime, and everything that followed came out of that stubbornness. Play this next to "Don't Speak" and the distance is genuinely startling.

This 180-gram reissue features lacquers cut by Ron McMaster at Capitol. On Interscope.