A beach in Somerset, a bed on the sand, and a row of red balls the size of gymnastic equipment. That image, designed by Storm Thorgerson, belongs to Wake Up and Smell the Coffee, the fifth studio album by the Irish band The Cranberries. The record came out on October 22, 2001, at a moment when the group was quietly running out of road.
A label switch and Dublin sessions
It was their only release on MCA Records. The label switch happened after PolyGram, which owned their old home Island Records, merged with Universal Music Group in 1999. The Cranberries had spent the 1990s as one of Ireland's biggest exports, but by 2001 the industry around them had consolidated and shifted. Wake Up and Smell the Coffee was the last album before a six-year break. The album was recorded at Windmill Lane Studios in Dublin, with Stephen Street producing. Street had worked with the band before, and his return gave the sessions a sense of continuity even as the label situation shifted around them.
Commercially, the album split the world in two. It reached number 2 in France, Italy, and Spain, yet in the United States it stalled at 46 on the Billboard 200 and at 61 in Britain. By 2002 worldwide sales stood at 1,300,000 copies, a solid figure but far from their earlier heights. In the US, only 170,000 copies had sold by April 2007.
Divided reviews and an unchanged lineup
Critics were just as divided. Metacritic records a score of 62 out of 100 from nine reviews. AllMusic gave it 3 stars out of 5, while Entertainment Weekly handed out a C−. The band itself was unchanged at the core: Dolores O'Riordan on vocals, guitar, and keyboards, Noel Hogan on guitar, Mike Hogan on bass, and Fergal Lawler on drums. Blender was warmer, giving the album 4 stars out of 5, while E! Online settled on a C+. Q and Slant Magazine both landed on 3 stars out of 5.
O'Riordan wrote all the lyrics, and the music was hers too, composed with Noel Hogan on a number of tracks. The American edition carried a bonus track called 'Cape Town'. Thorgerson, who also designed the previous Cranberries album Bury the Hatchet, built the cover around a strange visual leap: coffee granules became red balls, and the balls were blown up to the size of exercise balls. The main shoot happened on that Somerset beach. The cover existed in several versions. One showed a person lying on a bed on the beach, another only the red balls. The American edition used the balls as the front image and moved the person to the back of the booklet, while the Japanese edition placed the balls on a grassy field instead. The British special edition added live versions of "Dreams" and "Promises" plus a cover of Elvis Presley's "In the Ghetto". The international edition included a live "Salvation" and the same Presley cover, while the Japanese release offered live takes of "I Can't Be with You" and "Zombie" alongside it.
The 2023 vinyl debut
For more than two decades, the album existed only on CD and digital. No vinyl pressing was made in 2001. That changed on February 16, 2023, when a limited vinyl edition was announced for Record Store Day. The record finally appeared on vinyl on April 22, 2023, giving Wake Up and Smell the Coffee a second life in the format it had skipped entirely.
The story of the album is a story of timing. It arrived just after a merger that reshaped its label, just before a hiatus that paused the band, and just as the music industry was shedding the certainties of the 1990s. The red balls on the beach still mark the point where The Cranberries stepped away from the sound that made them famous.
The red balls on the beach still mark the point where The Cranberries stepped away from the sound that made them famous.
Dolores O'Riordan is gone, but the album remains a strange, unsettled document of a band at a crossroads. The vinyl release in 2023 did not rewrite its chart history or its mixed reviews. It simply made the record physical again, the way Thorgerson's beach scene always suggested: a surreal image waiting for someone to pick it up and play it.