Gwen Stefani insists her new album is “not a country record”

Gwen Stefani has said her upcoming fifth album is “not a country record”, despite her country-inflected new single ‘Somebody Else’s’, and the cowboy hat in the LP’s cover art.

Last week, the No Doubt singer took to Instagram to announce she’d soon be releasing her first record in seven years. “My fifth studio album, ‘Bouquet’, will be in full bloom on November 15th,” she wrote.

She’s since shared the album’s first single ‘Somebody Else’s’, which has a distinct country theme – seeming to suggest the upcoming songs would see Stefani fully immerse herself in the genre.

However, she’s since insisted that ‘Bouquet’ is “not a country record”, in a new interview with Rolling Stone.

“It’s all the stuff I listened to in the station wagon on the way to church,” she told the magazine. “Yacht rock, though it wasn’t called yacht rock then. The music I listen to now, I wanted this album to reflect that.”

Stefani is married to country singer Blake Shelton, who is set to feature on the album’s closer ‘Purple Iris’. You can pre-order / pre-save ‘Bouquet’ here.

Though ‘Bouquet’ won’t see Stefani pivot to country, there has been a wider trend of pop stars adopting the genre this year. Beyoncé released the colossal, country-inspired ‘Cowboy Carter‘ earlier this year, and Post Malone immersed himself in the genre for his album ‘F-1 Trillion’.

Elsewhere, Lana Del Rey shared that her upcoming album ‘Lasso’ was taking her in a country direction. Speaking to NME earlier this year, she joked about pop’s country boom: “When I gave Jack Antonoff his award for Best Producer Of The Year [at the 2024 Grammys], I said, ‘Welcome Nashville to Hollywood and Hollywood, welcome to Nashville because the music business has gone, gone country. And it went silent; 5000 people, dead silent. Then the next week, we had three major artists announce big country albums.”

In other news, Stefani recently reunited with No Doubt at Coachella this year, where the singer revealed she was “open” to future reunion plans – despite there being “no concrete plans for touring or new music”.

The singer added that the reunion – which was their first live show since 2015 – had been “a long time coming”, explaining: “It’s been something that we were going to do.”

The group also brought out Olivia Rodrigo at their Coachella performance for ‘Bathwater’, with Stefani asking the pop star on stage: “Olivia Rodrigo, why do good girls like me and you always want the bad boys?”

In other news, Garbage’s Shirley Manson has shared the moment when their label once chose to invest in No Doubt over them: “It was devastating”.

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