Zombie (song)


"Zombie" is a protest song by Irish alternative rock band the Cranberries, written about the 1993 IRA bombing in Warrington, and in memory of two young victims, Johnathan Ball and Tim Parry. It was released in September 1994 as the lead single from their second studio album, No Need to Argue. It preceded the release of No Need to Argue by two weeks.
The song was written by the band's lead singer Dolores O'Riordan and reached No. 1 on the charts of Australia, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany and Iceland, as well as on the US Billboard Modern Rock Tracks chart. It won the "Best Song" award at the 1995 MTV Europe Music Awards. The song was voted by Triple J listeners as No. 1 on the Triple J Hottest 100, 1994 chart.
In 2017, the song was released as an acoustic, stripped-down version on the band's Something Else album. In April 2020 it became the first song by an Irish band to surpass a billion views on Youtube. As of April 2020, Zombie has been streamed 472 million times on Spotify and has sold 778,942 copies in United Kingdom.

Background and composition

During The Troubles, more than 3,500 died and tens of thousands were injured in more than 30 years of brutality and complexity. The IRA, which are devoted both to removing British forces from Northern Ireland and to unifying Ireland, killed more than 2,000 people. There were over 10,000 bomb attacks at that time, in Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland and Great Britain, in an armed conflict between the Provisional IRA, Ulster loyalist paramilitaries, and the British security forces, which can be thought of as a struggle for identity.
The song was written in response to the death of Johnathan Ball, 3, and Tim Parry, 12, who had been killed in the IRA bombing in Warrington, northwestern England, when two devices hidden in litter bins were detonated. Johnathan Ball died at the scene of the bombing as a result of his shrapnel inflicted injuries and, five days later, Tim Parry lost his life as a result of fatal head injuries. 54 others were injured, some seriously. The two boys had gone shopping to buy Mother's Day cards on one of the town's busiest shopping streets.
The lyrics and chords of "Zombie" were written initially on an acoustic guitar in Ireland by Dolores O'Riordan alone late at night, during the Cranberries' English Tour in 1993. But then O'Riordan took it into rehearsals and it was translated onto an electric guitar. The song was recorded at Windmill Lane Studios in Dublin in 1994 with producer Stephen Street, and they spent a long time working on getting the guitar settings right to give a suitably expansive sound.
Dolores O'Riordan asserted: "The IRA are not me. I'm not the IRA. The Cranberries are not the IRA. My family are not.... When it says in the song, 'It's not me, it's not my family,' that's what I'm saying. It's not Ireland". The Cranberries' former manager Allen Kovac stated that Island Records urged them not to release the "politically urgent" song as a single, and that O'Riordan had ripped up a $1 million cheque the label offered her to work on another song. "Dolores was a very small, fragile person, but very opinionated," said Kovac. "Her belief was that she was an international artist and she wanted to break the rest of the world, and ‘Zombie’ was part of that evolution. She felt the need to expand beyond ‘I love you, you love me’ and write about what was happening in Ireland at the time", he said.
On 16 January 2018, Colin Parry, father of IRA victim Tim Parry, thanked Dolores O’Riordan for the "both majestic and also very real lyrics".

Voice

O'Riordan's mezzo soprano is not lilting when she does that sharp break from chest register to head register / falsetto in the second syllable of the word "Zombie." She's actually yodeling. Mikael Wood of Los Angeles Times described O’Riordan "pushing her voice to a jagged extreme to embody the pain". Sonia Saraiya, a music and TV critic from Miami Herald and Chicago Tribune, wrote for Variety that her voice "often seemed bigger than her petite frame", and also commented that the chorus "practically grunted out of her otherwise bell-like voice with a guttural vowel sound".

Music video

Synopsis

"Zombie" was released with a music video in October 1994. The video was directed by Samuel Bayer, and produced by Doug Friedman and HSI. Productions.
The music video was filmed in Belfast, Northern Ireland, during The Troubles with real footage. In the video, Dolores O'Riordan is covered in gold makeup and appears in front of a cross with a group of boys covered in silver makeup. The video also includes clips of local children playing war games, a performance by the Cranberries, and of British soldiers from the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders on patrol in Northern Ireland. It also features shots of various murals.
The "Zombie" music video was banned by the BBC at the time of the release of the song. What brought to an edited version instead, which focuses on colour performance images, filmed on a sound stage in Los Angeles over a period of 6 days.

Reception

The song and the official music video reflected a time and place, as well as an important piece of Irish identity, which "resonated with millions of people all over the world".
On 23 October 2019, "Zombie" was ranked No. 5 on a definitive list of the world's most-viewed rock music videos, released by Vevo.
On 18 April 2020, the official music video had succeeded in reaching over 1 billion views and became the first female-led song, first song by an Irish artist, and sixth song from the 20th century to reach the milestone.
On 20 April 2020, the video of "Zombie" was remastered in 4K resolution and officially released for YouTube, with previously unseen footage from the original video shoot.

Critical reception

In a contemporary review, Hot Press hailed the song and its arrangements, saying that it was stylistically different from the band's previous works: "Staccato rhythms and subtle jerks and pauses in the music and the singing make this more than just business-as-usual for the Cranberries. A slow, brooding Siouxsie-like buzzing guitar melody and dirge-like bass and drums counterpoint the elliptical and impassioned vocals of Dolores O’Riordan as she works her way through the internal psychic and external human tragedies of The Troubles ‘Zombie’ signals a growth in confidence".
The Rough Guide to Rock identified the album No Need to Argue as "more of the same" as the Cranberries' debut album, except for the song "Zombie", which had an "angry grunge" sound and "aggressive" lyrics.
Tedium's editor Ernie Smith said, "O'Riordan wrote it in a moment of anger and passion", and called the song "one of the defining songs of the alternative rock era". In a different perspective, Rebecca Black of Belfast Telegraph described "Zombie" as an "outraged response to the Warrington bombs", whilst music reporter Mark Savage wrote that "her pain was real", describing it as "a visceral response to the death of two children".
AllMusic said the song "trivialized" the events of the Troubles, and that the "heavy rock trudge" of the song did not play to the band's strengths.
Music critic Neil McCormick said this was the Cranberries' "fiercest rock song... An accusatory lament, it grapples with the endless recriminations of the Irish Troubles, with a slow rolling bass line and thumping mid-tempo beat, finding tension between melodic delicacy and introspection in the verses with a keening, wailing chorus charged with distorted grungy guitars".
On 5 August 1995, Billboard stated that No Need To Argue was the top-selling album of the first half of the year worldwide, with 5.1 million copies sold in six months.

Live performances

On 11 November 1994, the Cranberries featured as the musical guest on US talk show Late Show with David Letterman, performing the lead single one month after No Need to Argue was released. Jules LeFevre, Junkee's Music Editor, said the performance was "straight-up sublime".
The Cranberries played the song on their appearance on the U.S. show Saturday Night Live in 1995, in a performance that British author Dave Thompson called "one of the most powerful performances that the show has ever seen".
The Cranberries kept "Zombie", one of their signature songs, in their concert set lists throughout their career. The song appeared on the set list of their 2017 tour, featuring acoustic versions of their hits recorded with the Limerick-based Irish Chamber Orchestra's string quartet.

Track listings

UK and European CD1 single
UK and European CD2 single
UK and European 7" single
US two-track promo CD
UK VHS single

Charts

Weekly charts

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Year-end charts

Chart Position
Australia 7
Austria 7
Belgium 36
Belgium 2
Europe 7
France 2
Germany 4
Netherlands 41
Netherlands 52
New Zealand 17
Sweden 26
Switzerland 7

Certifications and sales

Bad Wolves cover

released a cover on 19 January 2018 as the second single from their debut album Disobey. The night of her death, on 15 January 2018, Dolores O'Riordan left a voice message to her friend, Managing Director of E7LG-Europe, Dan Waite, where she offered to "sing on it", on the cover that Waite had previously given O'Riordan to listen to and accredit. TMZ published this voice message on 5 April 2018. The cover was released without her vocals as a tribute. Bad Wolves slightly altered the lyrics, inserting a reference to drones and replacing "since 1916" Easter Rising in Dublin, with "in 2018" which also refers to the release date of their debut album Disobey. Bad Wolves also added two extra stanzas to the end of the song which were not present in the original song. The band's cover topped the US Billboard Mainstream Rock chart in May 2018 for three weeks. It peaked at number 54 on the Hot 100. In June 2018, at a concert in New York City, Bad Wolves donated $250,000 to O'Riordan's children.
In an interview, bassist Kyle Konkiel shared his thoughts on the new cover's sound:

Music video

The song's music video was directed by Wayne Isham and was released on 18 January 2018, the day before the band released the song as a single.
The video begins with text discussing the cover's background and the passing of O'Riordan. The video then cuts to shots of the band performing the song in a black room, wearing black clothing and playing black instruments interspersed with close-up scenes of a woman being covered in gold paint. The video then cuts in between shots of the band performing and the woman interacting with vocalist Tommy Vext which mainly involves her smearing gold paint on a glass pane between the two of them. After the guitar solo, she etches "1-15-18", the date of O'Riordan's death, into the paint. The woman's appearance is nearly identical to that of O'Riordan in the Cranberries' original Zombie music video. The video ends with a quote by Vext.

Track listing

Charts

Weekly charts

Year-end charts

Certifications and sales

Notable covers

In addition to the Bad Wolves cover: