Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can’t We? by The Cranberries

Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can't We? was the Cranberries' first full-length album, issued by Island Records in 1993 after a string of four EPs, and in a year when alternative rock was busy shredding its vocal cords, this Irish four-piece went the other way: chime, hush and open air. Stephen Street produced, and he keeps it all clean and uncluttered. Noel Hogan's guitar rings instead of roaring, Mike Hogan's bass and Fergal Lawler's drums stay light on their feet, and that leaves a wide space in the middle for the main event.

The main event is Dolores O'Riordan, whose voice swoops and keens and flips into little yelps, drifting over the band like morning fog. She and Noel Hogan wrote every song between them, and the pair know exactly how much to leave out. "Dreams" is a shimmering, giddy rush; "Linger" slows everything to a heartsick sway, and it turned into the band's highest-charting single in America.

The album was a slow burner that refused to go out. It went all the way to number one in both Britain and Ireland, and in June 1994, more than a year after it came out, it finally reached the top of the UK chart, only the fifth album ever to pull off that kind of late climb. In 2018 the three surviving members announced a 25th anniversary remaster stuffed with unreleased material from the period; it was pushed back to late that year after O'Riordan's death.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.