In the mid-1990s, when alternative was the new pop, there were all sorts of subgenres duking it out for dominance. The success of grunge put everything from Bush to Blind Melon on the radio, but perhaps the most curious alt offshoot to emerge in one corner of the mainstream was the ska revival. The third-wave ska scene ran the gamut from Reel Big Fish’s cornball, horn-driven antics to Less Than Jake’s emo-tinged losercore to Rancid’s gritty take on the Specials to Sublime’s frat-boy-and-420-friendly strain, not to mention the peppy breakthrough of longtime stalwarts the Mighty Mighty Bosstones. But there was no ’90s ska figure quite like Gwen Stefani, the movement’s Dickies-clad poster-girl turned culturally roving ’00s hitmaker turned People Magazine staple. There is also no pop star origin story quite like hers.

At the urging of Gwen’s keyboardist brother Eric, the Stefanis performed at a school talent show in their native Anaheim, California in the mid-’80s. Their song of choice was “On My Radio,” the 1979 hit by the two-tone ska band the Selecter. Gwen wore a homemade dress that resembled one worn by Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music, her favorite musical. Showtune theatrics and Selecter singer Pauline Black (who mixes a hyper-feminine chirp with an operatic warble) would go on to influence Gwen’s early vocal style, and set her on the path of pursuing hybrid sounds and aesthetics.

In 1986, Gwen and Eric formed a band alongside John Spence, their classmate and co-worker at the local Dairy Queen. Spence, whose go-to response—“No doubt!”—gave the group its name, shared vocal duties with Gwen and served as her gruff-voiced foil. They were just kids in love with the way British bands like the Selecter, Madness, and the Specials made everyday frustrations feel lively, and they were trapped in sunny Orange County, the home of Disneyland and suburban punk ennui. No Doubt played the house-party circuit, quickly found a local following, and picked up members, including bassist Tony Kanal, who would soon start dating Gwen in secret. But tragedy struck when, in 1987, Spence took his own life. It was the first of three destabilizing events that would change the course of No Doubt, a band forever defined by its interpersonal drama.

After trumpet-player-turned-co-vocalist Alan Meade exited No Doubt, Gwen was ready to front the band on her own. By 1990, the lineup was solidified with fan-turned-drummer Adrian Young, local metal guitarist Tom Dumont, and a robust horn section. Their popularity around Southern California clubs and colleges grew until finally, they caught the eye of Interscope A&R Tony Ferguson. In 1991, he brought famed record executive Jimmy Iovine to one of No Doubt’s shows, where “Jimmy told someone, ‘That girl will be a star in five years,’” recalled Gwen (and corroborated by Iovine) in a 1996 SPIN cover story. Over the next five years, Gwen would go from singing two-tone covers and her brother’s originals for devoted local crowds, to zig-zagging the globe with her own tales of heartache and rage. She would have to lose the two men closest to her first.

No Doubt’s debut for Interscope, a 1992 self-titled LP, was mostly (but not entirely) devoid of hooks, and partially informed by Eric’s cabaret flair and goofy sense of humor (they gave away kazoos at the album release party, if that explains anything). Poor sales made Interscope hesitant to dive right into a follow-up, and the label took a stronger hand in guiding the group’s sound, namely with producer Matthew Wilder. Eric didn’t like that, and over time he isolated himself from the band, despite practice being held at his house. After he quit in 1994 to work as an animator on The Simpsons, the other members took over songwriting duties on the album that would become Tragic Kingdom. Right around the same time, Kanal called it off with Gwen, after seven years together.

Gwen had never really written her own lyrics, but it helped that she was suddenly filled with pain and confusion. She was, in many ways, a girl with traditional values: In interviews from this era, she marveled at the fact that she got famous instead of starting a family, and her songs sometimes yearn for a “simple kind of life.” But this is perhaps not the impression you’d get from the initial wallop of Tragic Kingdom, featuring one of the decade’s fieriest opening four-song runs, all of which were singles: “Spiderwebs,” a new-wave rafter-shaker about a girl screening her calls; “Excuse Me Mr.”, a dramatic ska-punk number about a girl confronting a dude who’s avoiding her; “Just a Girl,” a fun-but-menacing-sounding hit about a girl just trying to live; and “Happy Now?”, an ever-shifting rock song about a girl chiding her ex. The point was made: girl mad.

Following the surge of third-wave feminism in the early ’90s, the mid-’90s became the peak of the “angry white female” era in rock and pop. It was a time when feminized aggression—from Hole and riot grrrl to Liz Phair and Alanis Morissette—was suddenly perceived as being on-trend, as if women haven’t been furious forever. Stefani, girly tomboy ultra, arguably benefited from this kind of branding, even while she maintained the fun, energetic personality that led Courtney Love to dub her a “cheerleader” and others to call her the “anti-Courtney Love.”

Lead single “Just a Girl” was Gwen’s bridge to planet angry. Upon its release in September 1995, it became a theme song for any girl fed up with living in a boy’s world—with the emphasis once again being on girl. Spice Girls would soon turn “girl power” into a full-on marketing technique, but “Just a Girl” was some kind of magic middle-ground in the context of ’90s pop-feminism: sassy, addictively sweet and sour, yet still accessible. Dumont’s indelible looping riff adds a taunting feeling, while the lyrics leave interpretation conveniently ajar with lines like “I’m just a girl/So don’t let me have any rights.” Never has Stefani’s vocal style—with its forays into babydoll voice and its breathless, swooping belts—felt more intentional as a performance technique meant to amplify her message. “Just a Girl” is not a subtle song, but what it’s doing is quietly masterful: The sarcasm subverts the underlying victimhood in a sneering way, but victimhood is also something girls (particularly white or privileged girls) quickly understand as a tool for getting what they want.

Gwen’s Tragic Kingdom-era pain was incandescent because it felt off the cuff, uninhibited, and barely removed from its cause. You saw that up close in “Don’t Speak,” the breakup ballad that pushed No Doubt’s success over the edge, topping the Billboard airplay chart for 16 weeks. Starting in late 1996 and continuing for much of 1997, flutters of Spanish guitar and angelic whispers of “hush hush, darling” were inescapable; for those listening across radio formats or watching MTV at the time, the song’s ubiquity reached “if I hear this one more time…” levels. But people also could not look away from the saga of Gwen and Tony, SoCal ska’s Stevie and Lindsey. Every night they’d hit the stage and seemingly be forced to relive their split through “Don’t Speak,” a song musically at odds with nearly everything in their upbeat catalog.

Not every song on Tragic Kingdom is overtly about the breakup or the frustrations of girlhood—this is ’90s California ska, after all, a few mostly positive chillers are required. But the album tracks skew cheesy, especially now. Ska bands of the era would sometimes show off their funk chops with a disco cut on their LPs, but No Doubt’s take, “You Can Do It,” is plagued by fake disco strings and a guitar jangle that borders on musical clip art. “Different People,” a brass-and-keyboard-led ska track about how the world is big and diverse, has the tension of a child’s picture book, and the depth of one too. Eric’s musical-theater-strikes-back closer “Tragic Kingdom” is cringeworthy in highly specific ways: the sampling of theme-park announcements, the egregiously drawn-out tempo changes, the fact that it seems to be about how evil Walt Disney is. (Besides, on an album like this, the most tragic of kingdoms is actually Gwen and Tony’s love story, not the suburbia surrounding Mickey’s castle.)

The rush of energy you get from Tragic Kingdom’s opening run is enough to keep the album within spitting distance of the ’90s canon, emblematic of a specific time and place. Other highs include sixth single “Sunday Morning,” where the seasoned band easily finds the pocket with nimble, driving percussion, reggae rhythms, and overdubbed harmonies. “End It On This,” one of the only songs credited to Dumont, Kanal, and both Stefanis, is low-key pummeling: Gwen, in all her high-low vocal glory, recalls the last kiss with Tony while the band fires on all cylinders. Every player gets to show off a little with their “thing,” but Dumont is the secret all-star: His tough opening riff sets the song into intricate lockstep. Dumont, much like fellow unlikely-’90s-rock-star Rivers Cuomo, was a Kiss fan and longtime metalhead; you can hear that in his guitar hooks, which lent Tragic Kingdom a fizzy edge.

If Weezer were politely challenging the post-grunge alternative landscape with moves copped from the Cars, No Doubt were more like Blondie: a band that came out of a distinct regional punk scene, hit it big with a hybrid new-wave sound, and faced both adoration and criticism largely centered around its platinum-blonde singer. This last factor became a central tension in the narrative of No Doubt once Tragic Kingdom began its long ascent up the charts (it was a diamond-seller by the decade’s end). There was this recursive interview cycle where the band would discuss how Stefani was always the solo cover star, which said magazine would also do; then the band would complain about that in their next interview. They portrayed the meta “photographer singles out Gwen” plotline in the “Don’t Speak” video, and to an extent did it themselves on the album cover, where Gwen poses in front offering up an orange while the guys scatter in the desolate grove behind her.

But Gwen’s solo career was always more a question of when. After Tragic Kingdom’s follow-up, 2000’s new-wave coming-of-age Return of Saturn, Stefani struck out on her own with duets alongside techno star Moby and rapper Eve, which suggested she was defined less by a specific sound than a particular attitude. It would take years, well after she appropriated Japanese Harajuku street style and scored more hip-hop hits, for people to recognize the pattern: the Orange County girl with a bindi between her Chola eyebrows had always been borrowing from other cultures and using it to form her identity in messy ways. Taking its cues from two-tone, where Jamaican rhythms met a punk point of view, Tragic Kingdom was only the beginning for Gwen. Back then, she was just an It Grrrl full of contradictions, pulling a little from everywhere and figuring out where to land.