Cranberries on new album In The End and Dolores O’Riordan’s demo vocals left after her death
- The Cranberries eighth and final album In the End, released last Friday, is fashioned from demo vocals O’Riordan recorded before her January 2018 death
- ‘You’d never know all the members of the band weren’t in the same room,’ said one music executive
Whether there would be a final Cranberries’ album hinged on what was on a hard drive on the other side of the world.
Last spring, the surviving members of the Irish band began combing through unfinished vocals that singer Dolores O’Riordan had sent to Ireland a few months before her death in January 2018.
What they had intrigued them, but they awaited with some anxiety the delivery of O’Riordan’s hard drive from her New York home. Relief came as soon as it was plugged it in. Her urgent, powerful voice was all over rudimentary songs she had not got around to email. “It was just like winning the Lotto,” says Noel Hogan, the band’s lead guitarist and co-writer. “And that was it. We had the songs.”
Like a parting gift, O’Riordan left enough strong vocals on the demos that the Cranberries were able to fashion them into their eighth and final album, In the End, released last Friday.
It’s an 11-track album with lyrics that explore personal turmoil over the Cranberries’ melodic, driving Celtic alt-rock. One music executive gave Hogan the best complement when it was finished: “You’d never know all the members of the band weren’t in the same room.”
