The Donnas

As the Donnas grew up and polished their technical abilities, their music evolved into a distinctly female take on arena metal, drawing more from AC/DC, Kiss, and Mötley Crüe than from punk. Some critics praised their cheerfully crude adoption of male sexual bravado; others complained that the band's music never transcended its vintage influences and remained suspicious that their bad-girl packaging was a bigger part of their appeal. The Donnas' third album, Get Skintight, appeared in 1999 and marked the first time the band composed its material with no outside assistance. That distinct hard rock influence began to creep into their compositions, underlined by their cover of Mötley Crüe's "Too Fast for Love"; they even opened a show for Cinderella. That year, they also appeared in the teen comedies Jawbreaker and Drive Me Crazy, the latter as the Electrocutes. In early 2001, the band issued The Donnas Turn 21, which continued their move away from punk and toward the hard rock mainstream of the '80s and '90s (this time the cover was Judas Priest's "Living After Midnight"). This caught the attention of major-label Atlantic, which signed them in late 2001. Launched by a new wave of publicity, the Donnas' label debut, Spend the Night, arrived in 2002 and became their first album to break into the Top 100 of the pop charts. It also earned them their biggest radio hit to date in the single "Take It Off," whose video also got some MTV airplay. In the summer of 2003, the Donnas played the main stage on the revived Lollapalooza tour. That September, after a full year and a half of touring and promoting, they took a break to rest up.

From 🇺🇸 United States