The Cranberries are set to release Something Else, a new album featuring re-worked renditions of their major hits, as well as brand new material. The album is due out April 28 via BMG on digital and CD formats, and includes seminal Cranberries songs like “Linger,” “Zombie,” “Dreams,” and “Ode To My Family”… re-recorded in orchestral and acoustic arrangements. The album is now available for pre-order.
Something Else celebrates the 25th anniversary of the band. Their first major U.S. hit “Linger” has been re-done acoustically, and just premiered on Rolling Stone! On the album concept and choice of “Linger” as the first single, The Cranberries’ singer-songwriter Dolores O’Riordan explains,
“‘Linger’ was the first song The Cranberries ever wrote together. I was 17, and the youngest member of the band was 15 at the time. We never imagined it’d be such a big hit, but soon us teenagers found ourselves on our first flight to the United States to shoot the video in Downtown LA. That video would introduce us to American households, in the good old days of MTV! The bittersweet love song still holds all that sentimentality for us personally, which is why we had to include it on this project. Universally, I think its message remains timeless and relevant, never going out of fashion, yet never quite in fashion. It’s amazing to have a song hold up 25 years later, and I hope this acoustic version allows our fans to hear a Cranberries classic in a new way.”
“Linger ” is available now for download and streaming. The full album is available for pre-order on digital and CD formats.
The Cranberries – Linger official audio
Last year, over two weeks in the University of Limerick, at the home of the Irish Chamber Orchestra, the band revisited old times; Dolores laid down vocals as small booths were created to record the instruments as if live. She was no longer a child, singing her amazing, mature songs from an inexperienced vantage point but a woman now, with the capacity to throw her life at the music, the benefit of hindsight. “I prefer them like this,” she says of the new recordings of old songs, “with a little bit more experience behind them, with a new lease of life. They sound fresh again.”
As the record began to take full shape, three new songs were added, to stop it just being a Proustian rush of memories lost and found. The first was The Glory, which Dolores explains she wrote in The Irish Chamber Orchestra’s rehearsal rooms at the University of Limerick. She then brought out two songs she had been keeping in her personal stash, until she could place them in the right home: “Rupture” (“about depression, about being in that black hole and finding it hard to get out of it”) and the forthcoming single “Why?” (“written just after my father passed, the hardest time”).
It’s testament to Dolores and Noel’s song-writing prowess that the new additions to the Cranberries cannon sit seamlessly next to the old. When they began finalising details for the record, they decided on Something Else, a nod to the first record’s Everybody Else…, a title neither riven with the promise of future endeavours or locked into the past.
Official Album Artwork
Shot by Andy Earl, the photographer for The Cranberries’ Everybody Else Is Doing It cover
Official Tracklisting
01. Linger **
02. The Glory
03. Dreams
04. When You’re Gone
05. Zombie
06. Ridiculous Thoughts
07. Rupture
08. Ode To My Family
09. Free To Decide
10. Just My Imagination
11. Animal Instinct
12. You & Me
13. Why
Pre-Order & Streaming Options:
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UK & Ireland Tour Dates
17 May Belfast, Waterfront
18 May Dublin, BordGais Theatre
20 May London, Palladium
22 May Bristol, Colston Hall
24 May Gateshead, The Sage
25 May Nottingham, Royal Concert Hall
27 May York, Barbican
28 May Manchester, Bridgewater Hall
Tickets
More on The Cranberries:
In the autumn of 2013, as her hometown of Limerick was preparing to open its tenure as Irish City of Culture in 2014, The Cranberries singer-songwriter Dolores O’Riordan was approached by the city to play a special gig. On New Year’s Eve, she would perform with a quartet from the Irish Chamber Orchestra, playing four songs from her starred back catalogue – three Cranberries, one solo – on a stage erected outside city hall. “It was a beautiful night,” she recalls.
At that moment, singing songs that have endured a generation, punctuating pleasingly diverse points of the cultural graph, from glossy high-end car ads to Mission:Impossible soundtracks to becoming time-honoured radio staples, immediately identifiable from the tender fury of Dolores’ vocal phrasing, she realized an anniversary was coming up. The following year, 2015, was to mark 25 years since the beginning of The Cranberries, the Irish band that would dominate a particular corner of the 90s. You might place The Cranberries early suite of albums as an emotional mid-point on the trajectory from The Sundays’ Reading, Writing and Arithmetic, 10,000 Maniacs’ In My Tribeand Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill, records exploring a new, uncompromised, compelling femininity bridging a further gap between indie aesthetics and unexpected, huge global success.
Certainly, The Cranberries had no less impact than any of their companion pieces, drawn in a post-Madonna climate of empowerment. The figures stacked up. By 2000, Cranberries till receipts for their first four records Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can’t We?, No Need to Argue, To The Faithful Departed and Bury The Hatchet had amassed to over 40 million. Immediately, they were blessed with a kind of US success other bands take ten years trying to secure, with a hit rate and notoriety that perhaps only indigenous stars U2 and Sinead O’Connor could match.
Dolores was 18 years old when The Cranberries began. “Really,” she says, “I was just a child back then.” She’d been out of Ireland only once, to see her sister in London. “I was an innocent eighteen-year-old, as well. I was not a mature one. I was more like a fifteen-year-old.” When REM’s Michael Stipe turned up to watch them film the video for their omnipresent debut hit “Linger,” a whisper of a song that scorches with love’s own fire, Dolores had no idea why. “When we came back from America, we met Bono, at about the same time. He was ever so nice to us.” These mysterious encounters continued across the decade. “I was probably very lucky that the songs got to be so successful but it also had its downsides, like growing up in the public eye. I didn’t have a normal transition from high school into college or the real world. It was heightened. Success was overwhelming to me, really. And when you become successful at that level you’re so busy working that you don’t have any time to look at it and work out what it is you’re going through.”
25 years later, perhaps now was the moment to reassess. An unusual request from The Bachelorette, the US TV show for competing girls to win the hand of a handsome, eligible young man was the touchstone putting Dolores back in touch with Cranberries co-writer Noel Hogan after the band’s hiatus since 2012. The show producers asked them to serenade the couple on their last date for the season finale, filmed in Christchurch Cathedral, Dublin. Though she has been based between Canada, New York and Ireland over the past few years, it is the latter that will influence forever the singer, the band, the soul of The Cranberries. With The Bachelorette airing to almost 10 million US viewers, a new generation was keen to find out more.
Since their 90s commercial peak, The Cranberries have not been an inactive operation. They still tour and record to the faithful, massive audience they amassed (including a devoted social media following & 4M+ Facebook followers), with songs touched with both the immediacy of hit-maker hooks and the timelessness of classics.
