Released 19 September 1994 Label Island | Format CD single
video single | |
Recorded 1994 at Windmill Lane Studios Genre Alternative rock
grunge Length 5:06 (album/video version #1)
4:11 (video version #2/radio edit) | ||
"Zombie" is a protest song by Irish rock band The Cranberries. It was released in September 1994 as the lead single from their second studio album, No Need to Argue (1994). The song was written by the band's lead singer Dolores O'Riordan, and reached No. 1 on the charts in Australia, Belgium, France, Denmark, and Germany.
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It won the "Best Song" award at the 1995 MTV Europe Music Awards.
In 2017, the song was released as an acoustic, stripped down version on the band's Something Else album.
Composition
"Zombie" is composed in the key of E Minor with a tempo of 84 beats per minute.
Production
Zombie was written during the Cranberries' English Tour in 1993, in memory of two boys, Jonathan Ball and Tim Parry, who were killed in an early-1993 IRA bombing in Warrington.
Reception
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. 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 calls "one of the most powerful performances that the show has ever seen".
Greil Marcus wrote that Zombie created a "displacement" by reference to the 1916 Easter Rising, and that it was "bizarre" for a song of the pop genre to refer to events before the lifetime of the target audience. 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.
Track listings
Music video
"Zombie" was released with a music video in October 1994. The video was directed by Samuel Bayer, and produced by Doug Friedman and H.S.I. Productions.
In the video, Dolores O'Riordan is covered in gold makeup and appears in front of a cross. The video also includes clips of children playing war games, and of British soldiers from the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders (as evident from their thin red line tactical recognition flashes) on patrol in Northern Ireland.
The unsuspecting troops were told that their footage was to be included in a documentary about the day-to-day operations of various peace-keeping forces. The video was filmed in Belfast, Northern Ireland.
As of February 2017, the video has over 480 million views on YouTube, and is one of 250 most viewed videos on the site.