The Cranberries
A Limerick band fronted by Dolores O'Riordan's unmistakable keening wail, The Cranberries seemed to come out of nowhere in 1993 and then were impossible to escape — "Linger," "Dreams," and then "Zombie," the stadium-sized protest song that outlived the decade.
Formed in Limerick, Ireland, in 1989, The Cranberries solidified when Dolores O'Riordan joined as lead vocalist in mid-1990. Their 1993 debut, "Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can't We?," arrived with two immediately inescapable singles: "Linger," which peaked at No. 8 on the Billboard Hot 100 and spent 24 weeks on the chart, and "Dreams." The album eventually sold 5 million copies in the US alone.
Then on September 19, 1994, they released "Zombie," the lead single from their second album, "No Need to Argue," and it became something else entirely. O'Riordan wrote it about the Warrington bombing of March 20, 1993, in which two children — Johnathan Ball, age 3, and Tim Parry, age 12 — were killed. She described the song as anti-violence, not political, but either way it was everywhere: No. 1 in Australia, France, Germany, and elsewhere, and Best Song at the 1995 MTV Europe Music Awards. "No Need to Argue" became the band's biggest seller, going 7× platinum in the US.
By mid-1996, The Cranberries' combined albums had sold more than 22 million copies. Later records couldn't recapture that lightning, and the band went on hiatus in 2003. O'Riordan died unexpectedly on January 15, 2018, but the legacy held: in April 2020, the "Zombie" video passed one billion YouTube views — the first song by an Irish artist to reach that milestone. A final album, "In the End," arrived in 2019 before the band disbanded.
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