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Mar 07, 2018 Dolores O’Riordan By Christopher Roberts

Dolores O’Riordan, frontwoman for 1990s Irish alt-rock band The Cranberries, unexpectedly died in London in January. Now, as Stereogum points out, the band have posted a new statement to their website where they announce that they are working on a final album featuring material they worked on with O’Riordan before she died and they hope to release it early next year. They are also prepping a reissue of their 1993 debut album, Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can’t We?, which they also worked on with O’Riordan. The reissue was originally going to be released this month in honor of its exact 25th anniversary, but has been pushed back to later this year in light of O’Riordan’s passing.

Here’s the full statement from the band:

“This month marks the 25th anniversary of the release of our debut album Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can’t We? In recent weeks we have had a number of media enquiries asking if we were planning anything to commemorate this milestone.

We can confirm that since last summer the band had been working with Universal Music on the creation of a very special 25th anniversary edition of the album, a newly re mastered version with previously unreleased material of ours as well as other bonus material from the era of our debut album. We had planned to release this special edition this month to coincide with the 25th anniversary. However, given Dolores’ passing in January we put the entire project on hold.

In recent weeks we revisited this. After much consideration we have decided to finish what we started. We thought about it and decided that as this is something that we started as a band, with Dolores, we should push ahead and finish it. So that’s the plan, to finish the project and get the special 25th anniversary edition album out later this year.

We will also be completing the recording of a new studio album as previously announced, which we also started last year and for which Dolores had already recorded the vocals. All going well we hope to have this new album finished and out early next year.

We will keep you all up to date as things progress.
Noel, Mike and Ferg”

The Cranberries formed in 1989 (originally as The Cranberry Saw Us), with O’Riordan joining brothers Noel Hogan (guitar) and Mike Hogan (bass) and drummer Fergal Lawler a year later. It was a rough version of her song “Linger” that helped earn her a place in the band. A three-song demo featuring early versions of future hits “Linger” and “Dreams” earned them a record deal with Island after a label bidding war and Rough Trade head Geoff Travis as their new manager. Their 1993 debut album, Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can’t We?, which was produced by Stephen Street (The Smiths, Blur), wasn’t an instant hit. But a tour supporting Britpop mainstays Suede earned them further attention and soon MTV was playing the videos for “Linger” and “Dreams,” which led to the album eventually reaching #1 on the U.K. album charts and it selling over five million copies in America.

1994 sophomore album, No Need to Argue, was an even bigger success, selling seven million copies in America. It was also produced by Street and was fueled by political hit single “Zombie,” which O’Riordan wrote in response to a 1993 IRA bombing that killed two children.

They never quite matched the success of their first two albums, with their next album, 1996’s To the Faithful Departed, selling two million copies in the U.S. (still a lot of albums). 1999’s Bury the Hatchet and 2001’s Wake Up and Smell the Coffee also didn’t make as much of an impact as their earlier work and the band went on hiatus from 2004 to 2009, during which O’Riordan embarked on a solo career, releasing 2007’s Are You Listening? and 2009’s No Baggage. She also teamed up with Olé Koretsky and The Smiths’ Andy Rourke as D.A.R.K., who released one album, 2016’s Science Agrees.

The Cranberries reunited and released their sixth album, Roses, in 2012. In 2017 they released Something Else, an album of newly recorded acoustic and orchestral versions of their previous songs. Last May the band cancelled the remainder of their European tour dates due to O’Riordan’s health issues and then cancelled their North American dates last July for the same reason. O’Riordan was in London for a short recording session when she died.

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