“No Need to Argue” by the Cranberries

A 90s alternative standout turns 30.

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Welcome to a new edition of the Best Music of All Time newsletter!

Today’s music pick celebrates the 30th anniversary of the Cranberries scintillating sophomore album.

Genre: Alternative, Rock

Label: Island

Release Date: October 3, 1994

Vibe: 🧟

In the Rolling Stone review for No Need to Argue, Wif Stenger panned the record, explaining that “the sweetness of the debut has been replaced by a stodgy adult bitterness like tea steeped too long or porter gone sour.” Isn’t that the point? Roger Ebert had similar advice for those complaining that 1983’s Scarface was too over the top. “What were Pacino's detractors hoping for?” he asked. “Something internal and realistic? Low key?”

I have a similar line of thinking about this record. Because it wasn’t seen, at the time, as the same sonic experience as its predecessor, 1993’s Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can't We?, the critical reaction was decidedly mixed. This phenomenon is fascinating to me in retrospect, especially on a relisten. I thought a lot of the mellow, understated arrangements share qualities with that debut, purposely leaving plenty of room for Dolores O'Riordan’s voice to do the heavy lifting. It’s the correct strategy. If you have that kind of asset in your band to connect with your audience emotionally, you get out of the damn way.

Songs like “Everything I Said” and “Dreaming My Dreams” are good examples of what I’m talking about. The former swirls and sways around O'Riordan, with big cymbal crashes punctuating the controlled intensity in her voice. Lines like, “But I don't make you lonely/I'll get over you,” hit you in the gut. The latter reaches back into the earnest romantic energy of “Linger,” the track that broke the band into the mainstream stateside. It’s the kind of haunting, ethereal aesthetic that would be right at home in a Twins Peaks episode.

That softer material, which ranks among the best Cranberries songs ever produced, often takes a backseat to heavier rock outliers like “Zombie.” It's an exquisite grunge-metal hybrid, an uncompromising critique of the Troubles in Northern Ireland and its inescapable collateral damage. The distorted guitars loom large in the mix, punctuated by booming snare and tom hits from drummer Fergal Lawler. According to him, the sheer scale of the noise was O'Riordan’s. “She was adamant how she wanted more distortion pedals on the guitars and for me to hit the drums harder than usual,” Lawler explained.

When comparing a band’s “typical” sound against its best-known single, you’d be hard-pressed to find an odder couple than “Zombie” for the Cranberries. Vocally, it’s shouted more than it’s sung. Lyrically, it’s angrier than it is sad or hopelessly romantic. Aesthetically, it doesn’t ease you into a mood or meet you where you are with any comforting sentiment. It’s as loud and in-your-face as 90s alternative music gets, making it easy to see why Island Records and the group’s management were hesitant to put it out as the lead single for No Need to Argue.

As O’Riordan put it in 2017, tension between the UK and Northern Ireland was at a boiling point when she wrote the song.

“There were a lot of bombs going off in London and I remember this one time a child was killed when a bomb was put in a rubbish bin – that's why there's that line in the song, 'A child is slowly taken.' [ ... ] We were on a tour bus and I was near the location where it happened, so it really struck me hard – I was quite young, but I remember being devastated about the innocent children being pulled into that kind of thing. So I suppose that's why I was saying, 'It's not me' – that even though I'm Irish it wasn't me, I didn't do it. Because being Irish, it was quite hard, especially in the UK when there was so much tension.”

Despite the lack of internal support, she and the rest of the band stuck to their guns (which supposedly included ripping up a million-dollar cheque from the label to work on another song), and it paid off in spades. It went to No. 1 all over Europe, including France, Denmark, Belgium, and, yes, Ireland. Remarkably, it never charted on the Hot 100 during its initial run, partly because Island and the band didn’t want to be typecast as “pop” in any way. But, per the Los Angeles Times, “Zombie” was “the most played song ever on alternative radio in the history of America” in 1994. Perhaps more importantly for a protest song, it gained even more exposure when it was banned in 2003 by the British government in the wake of the Iraq War and again in 2006 by CBS for related reasons.

That’s how you know your band has made it an international phenomenon.

I wonder if “Zombie” was such a revelation that it somewhat knocked this album’s reputation off its axis. Beyond that anthem, No Need to Argue more than lives up to the standards set by its debut LP. It also represents the kind of evolution that many fans look for in a sophomore effort. That was one of the weaknesses of U2’s discography, for example—that their follow-up studio effort was too much of a carbon copy of that first record. It’s not like the Cranberries ditched what made them special here, far from it. But, in the space of a calendar year, they also accelerated the creative growth that would take other (and not necessarily lesser) groups far longer. Because of this, there are no skips on this record. Some songs hit harder than others, but there’s absolutely zero filler.

Like any winning recipe, they tweaked and refined it to captivating effect.

👉 Don’t forget to click the album image to stream the album on your favorite platform 👈