On it, O’Riordan, who recorded demos for the album’s 11 tracks before her death in January last year, sings: “Fighting’s not the answer/ Fighting’s not the cure/ It’s eating you like cancer/ It’s killing you for sure.” The band have spoken about how O’Riordan was singing about leaving many of the negative things in her life behind. “Wake Me When it’s Over”, the third track on In the End, could be “Zombie”’s twin. She was deeply affected by the deaths, and would no doubt have been devastated by recent events in Northern Ireland as well. “Zombie” was a protest song written by the band’s late frontwoman Dolores O’Riordan after two children were killed by IRA bombs – was released. There’s a cruel irony that the release of The Cranberries’ final album should come just a week after journalist Lyra McKee was shot dead by the New IRA during a riot in Londonderry. At other times, like on that same album’s “Shark Smile”, they are playfully blunt: “And she said woo, baby, take me / And I said woo, baby, take me too.” Sometimes, Lenker’s lyrics are elaborate – “When you looked at me, your eyes were like machinery/ Your hands were making artefacts in the corner of my mind,” she sings on “Mary”, a stand-out track from the band’s brilliant 2017 album Capacity. It’s a trait in keeping with her band’s music – heady folk-rock that is unflinchingly sincere. Introspective and softly spoken, Lenker seems to see the wonder in everything: love, death, birth, trauma, wounds, a sunset, “the way that a raspberry can pop out of the earth”. “OK, I see that you’re there, and I see that you’re a part of me – and you know what, I accept that you’re there and I love you.” The only thing that will work to change and transform this energy is if I show it love, not just more rejection, more abandonment.” She cups her hands, as if she’s holding an invisible orb. “I’ve been thinking lately how I have these certain wounds inside of myself,” she says, while sitting motionless on a rocking chair in a London hotel room, “and if I don’t heal them, they will control me.
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Where most interviewees take some time to crack open, the 27-year-old goes disorientingly deep almost instantly. Speaking to Big Thief’s lead singer Adrianne Lenker is intense.