Scott Litt; they travelled from the Bay Area to Los Angeles to start pre-production with him in January 2004. They liked his work with R.E.M. and assumed the partnership would be a good experience based on prior conversations they had. though any work proved fruitless. Upon meeting up, the band realised Litt wanted a different sound than what they were aiming for. From a selection of four-to-five people, they came across Butch Walker, who had recently completed sessions with Avril Lavigne. He was aware there had been some form of disagreement between Litt and the band, and that they wanted to show some growth as a unit. Walker and the band spent sometime discussing music they liked growing up and what they wanted to takeaway from their influences. In June and July 2004, the band and Walker recorded drums at Black in Back studio, before moving to Conway Recording Studios in Hollywood, California. Paul David Hager served as the main engineer throughout recording, while Seth Waldman, Tony Rambo and Lars Fox acted as assistant engineers. As Castellano was still recovering, the rest of the band recorded their parts first. Chris Lord-Alge mixed the recordings at Image Recording Studios, also in Hollywood, with assistant engineers Keith Armstrong and Dmitar Kranjaic. Emily Lazar then mastered the album at The Lodge in New York City, with assistant engineer Sarah Register. Composition Gold Medal continues the hard rock sound of Spend the Night; while influences from AC/DC and the Ramones can still be heard, the band also incorporate portions from Alice Cooper, Golden Earring and Steppenwolf. Uncut writer Stephen Dalton described it as 1970s rock "pastiche meets revved-up sugar-rush melodies, cynical teen-romance lyrics and knowingly dumb sexual innuendo". Bassist Maya Ford Spend the Night was "all fast and hard [...] we limited ourselves"; for Gold Medal, they decided they "should do just what ever we want to do and experiment". Discussing the album's title, Robertson said: "To us, it's going for what we think is the gold. On each song we just went with what sounded best instead of going, 'Oh, the Donnas would never do that.. They collaborated together instead of letting one individual do a bulk of the writing, resulting in a more melodic sound, aided by Walker's past production work with Lavigne and Simple Plan. The opening track to Gold Medal, "I Don't Want to Know (If You Don't Want Me)",