- Animal Instinct
- Loud And Clear
- Promises
- You And Me
- Just My Imagination
- Shattered
- Desperate Andy
- Saving Grace
- Copycat
- What's On My Mind
- Delilah
- Fee Fi Fo
- Dying In The Sun
- Sorry Son
Healing After the Storm
When Bury the Hatchet arrived in 1999, it felt like a deep exhale - the sound of a band stepping out from the shadow of chaos and into the fragile brightness of renewal. After years of fame, grief, and silence, The Cranberries returned not with the thunderous defiance of their early days, but with something far more human: acceptance. The album’s title says it all - this is music about forgiveness, about laying old ghosts to rest and finding the courage to feel again.
Dolores O’Riordan’s voice, ever the emotional compass of the group, carries the album with both vulnerability and steel. She doesn’t roar so much as reveal - the cracks, the tenderness, the survival. There’s still fire in her delivery, but it burns differently now: less like rage, more like truth. The sharp edges of sorrow are softened by self-awareness, and the melodies - lush yet uncluttered - mirror that uneasy balance between pain and peace.
Musically, Bury the Hatchet feels like an evolution rather than a reinvention. The band’s signature blend of jangling guitars and ethereal melancholy remains intact, but there’s a newfound clarity in the sound, a brightness that wasn’t there before. You can sense them reclaiming their identity, not as the angry young outsiders of the mid-’90s, but as artists learning to live with what they’ve seen and lost.
What makes the album endure is its emotional honesty. It doesn’t chase trends or grandeur - it simply breathes, reflecting the cyclical nature of healing: the flare-ups, the doubts, the fleeting peace. Beneath the pop sheen lies a quiet defiance - the insistence that even after everything, life goes on, and love, though bruised, still matters.
Bury the Hatchet may not shout as loudly as No Need to Argue or glow with the innocence of Everybody Else Is Doing It, but it offers something rarer: resolution. It’s the sound of wounds closing, of hearts learning their own strength. In the end, it’s less about burying anger and more about planting something new in its place - a fragile, persistent hope that refuses to die.
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My personal view:
After the relatively disappointing To the Faithful Departed of 1996, this was a bit of a "make or break" album for the band. On one hand they played it safe, returning to a style that was successful in the past, on the other hand, they did record some of their best work doing so - and arguably the most consistent album in terms of quality. My picks are Animal Instinct, Just My Imagination, Shattered, Saving Grace, What's On My Mind, Dying In The Sun, and above all my favourite Cranberries track: Promises.