Before the fruit showers, Gwen Stefani had a confession to make, her voice as soft as the foam oranges to come.
“Some of this music is kind of painful,” the No Doubt frontwoman acknowledged from the Sphere stage as she introduced “Ex-Girlfriend,” a song about her breakup with bassist Tony Kanal, who rocks a Prince “Purple Rain” T-shirt to her left. “It gives me PTSD.”
Seven tunes later, said oranges rained down from the rafters during heart-in-a-vise ballad “Don’t Speak,” another tune about her split from Kanal, the plush novelties a nod to the Anaheim-born band’s Orange County, California, roots.
The two hits — polar opposites of sadness, the former an up-tempo calorie-burner; the latter a downbeat lament capable of wringing tears from an eggplant — encapsulate the No Doubt songbook, in which catharsis frequently gets King Midas-ed into gold records.
And packed concert halls, as evidenced by the sold-out debut of No Doubt’s 18-show residency at Sphere on Wednesday, which marks their first extended run of shows in 14 years.
“There’s no looking back,” Stefani sang on a brusque “Happy Now?,” though the band seemed out to prove otherwise on this night, revisiting some of their earliest material and airing a slew of rarely performed deep cuts.
Among these chestnuts was “The Climb,” whose lyrics address the rigors of scaling the ladder to success, the band stuck on its bottom rung at the time it was penned, having dropped a pair of modestly selling albums in the early ’90s.
It was fitting that No Doubt hadn’t played the song since 1997: That was the year that the climb in question officially ended for the band after their third record, 1995’s “Tragic Kingdom,” sold millions of copies, rocketing them to stardom.
Sunny but angsty
No Doubt opened their 21-song, nearly two-hour set with that album’s title track — performed for the first time in 17 years — and played 10 of its 14 tracks.
“Tragic Kingdom” topped the charts at the tail end of the grunge boom and was a timely smash, No Doubt’s bright, horn-enhanced, ska-derived sound providing a sharp tonal shift away from all that overcast alt-rock.
They were sunny SoCal contrasted with gray Seattle, plaid in place of flannel — even if, lyrically speaking, they had plenty of angst in common. Even when they were happy sounding, No Doubt tunes weren’t always happy, Stefani wrangling with the aforementioned heartache and frequently pushing back on societal expectations and restrictions placed upon women in songs like “Excuse Me Mr.,” driven hard on Wednesday by guitarist Tom Dumont’s meaty riffing and Adrian Young’s hammer-handed drumming, and “Just a Girl,” for which Stefani brought a crew of female crowd members up on stage with her in a sign of solidarity.
But what distinguished No Doubt was how they processed their frustrations: They preferred to shake their hips in place of their fists, Stefani leading the way with her Betty Boop voice and Rosie the Riveter ruggedness, a high-energy cocktail of sensuality and toughness, fishnets and combat boots.
Getting emotional
A blur of costume changes and constant movement, Stefani was nearly as animated as the 200-foot-tall cartoon version of herself that loomed across the Sphere screen when the band stormed through ska-punk heatseeker “Total Hate ’95.”
“I’m getting a little emotional here,” Stefani announced before beginning the tune. “I feel like I just want to slap you; I just want to spank you.”
She let the song do all that dirty work instead.
Throughout the show, the band chronicled their past via archival video footage aired during numerous interludes — “We’ve gone through a lot of stuff as a band. Death, breakups,” Kanal narrated at one point, alluding to the 1987 suicide of original singer John Spence and the end of his relationship with Stefani.
She amplified this reflective tone at times.
“I often think about the world in which I live today,” Stefani told the crowd early in the show. “And how that world has changed.”
But sometimes, this change is necessary, which Stefani underscored during a show-closing “Sunday Morning.”
“Sappy pathetic little me,” she sang. “That was the girl I used to be,” emphasis placed on the past tense.
Contact Jason Bracelin at [email protected] or 702-383-0476. Follow @jasonbracelin76 on Instagram.