Formed in 1990 in Limerick, Ireland, The Cranberries rose to fame with their first (and best) album when their earnest, Celtic-tinged shimmer struck the ear as almost trance music, powered by Dolores O’Riordan’s honeyed Enya-gone-pop vocals.
You could get lost in the strum of Linger, the gently pulsing highlight of Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can’t We? The entire album flowed like a musical alpha wave, from guitarist Noel Hogan’s arpeggios to O’Riordan’s quavering vocals – especially the breathy falsetto in her voice.
The debut LP proved hard to top, as the follow-up, No Need To Argue (1994), was a mannered photocopy – although it spawned the #1 hit Zombie, written in tribute to the victims of the 1993 Warrington bombings carried out by the IRA – and the third album, To The Faithful Departed (1996), was strident and shrill.
On Bury The Hatchet (1999), though, the band returned to where they once belonged: gorgeous, gauzily textured pop with lingering melancholy undercurrents.
Further albums followed – Wake Up and Smell the Coffee (2001), Roses (2012) and Something Else (2017) – but the band never replicated its earlier success.
Dolores O’Riordan passed away on 15 January 2018. She was found submerged in the bath in her room at London’s Park Lane Hilton hotel. An inquest ruled that she had accidentally drowned due to alcohol intoxication. She was just 46.
Their final album, In the End, was released in April 2019.
