Every Smiths Album, Ranked – SPIN

Steven Patrick Morrissey was born in 1959, and became an obsessive music fan as a teenager, writing countless letters to U.K. music magazines, running New York Dolls and Sparks fan clubs, singing with the punk band the Nosebleeds, and clubbing in Manchester’s gay bars. Morrissey met guitarist Johnny Marr at a Patti Smith show in 1978, and in 1982 they decided to start a band together, drafting bassist Andy Rourke and drummer Mike Joyce.

The Smiths were only an active band for a little more than five years, but made the most of their time together, recording four studio albums along with frequent non-album singles. In that time, they became one of the most divisive, adored, and influential bands in England, with Morrissey performing mononymously under his last name.

After the Smiths split up in 1987, Johnny Marr became a revered freelance guitar slinger, forming Electronic, guesting on dozens of albums, and serving stints as a member of the Pretenders, Modest Mouse, and The The. Morrissey has continued performing Smiths songs while becoming infamous for canceling or postponing hundreds of shows and taking increasingly controversial political positions. His 14th solo album Make-Up is a Lie was released in March, but that bloke isn’t funny anymore. Joyce and Rourke continued playing together, backing Sinead O’Connor and forming the supergroup Moondog One with members of Oasis and Stone Roses.

The Smiths have never reunited, although Joyce and Rourke played on a pair of Morrissey singles in 1989. Rourke died of pancreatic cancer in May 2023, closing the door on the possibility of the original quartet ever playing together again. Meanwhile, the Smiths’ songs keep bubbling up into pop culture, soundtracking films about giant robots (2018’s Bumblebee) and hitmen (2023’s The Killer) and influencing generations of bands. What’s the greatest Smiths album?

6. Rank (1988)

BBC Radio 1 broadcast the Smiths’ October 1986 show in London, less than two months before the band’s last full-length concert. After the band’s breakup, an edited down portion of that recording was released as the only official Smiths live album to fulfill a contractual obligation to Rough Trade. The stage patter never goes far beyond “this is our new single,” and it’s puzzling that the instrumental “The Draize Train” was included over some of the popular hits the band played that night, but it’s still close to an ideal Smiths live document.

Rank may be ranked last, no pun intended, but only because it’s less essential than the band’s studio recordings. And it makes a compelling argument for the rhythm section’s importance to the Smiths’ sound, with Joyce propelling explosive renditions of “The Queen Is Dead” and “London.” “No other band of the ’80s has been able to write anthems that take the cock out of rock and still devour any stadium or hall without attracting the lagered legions of rugby boys with dull damp pits to their U2 T-shirts and underwear. That unification of the lonely and the choosy brings out a fiery and youthful roar untainted by the macho chants that generally plague live LPs,” wrote James Brown (not that one, obviously) in the NME review of Rank.

5. The Smiths (1984)

Morrissey chose the Smiths’ nondescript band name to symbolize that “It was time that the ordinary folk of the world showed their faces.” The band’s debut, released less than two years after the band had formed, was recorded quickly and on the cheap, with half the songs tracked in a single night. But the album debuted at No. 2 on the U.K. album charts, disrupting a pop scene dominated by the sparkly synths of the Human League and OMD with jangly guitars and literate lyrics that were at once nostalgic and refreshingly bold.

American pressings of The Smiths added the band’s first chart hit, the effervescent “This Charming Man,” to the tracklist. Without that inclusion, though, the original record is the most dour and downtempo album, bookended by its two longest songs, “Reel Around the Fountain” and “Suffer Little Children,” which both allude to child abuse and lost innocence. “Though Morrissey’s voice — a sometimes toneless drone that can squeal off without warning into an eerie falsetto — takes some getting used to, it soon comes to seem quite charming, set as it is amid the delicately chiming guitars of cocomposer Johnny Marr. And the eleven songs here are so rhythmically insinuating that the persistent listener is likely to find himself won over almost without warning,” Kurt Loder wrote in the Rolling Stone review of The Smiths.

4. Strangeways, Here We Come (1987)

Marr and Morrissey co-produced the fourth Smiths album with longtime engineer Stephen Street, who’d become a fixture of U.K. rock for decades, producing hit albums for Morrissey, Blur, Kaiser Chiefs, and Ireland’s the Cranberries. Despite the creative tensions that broke up the band before the album even hit stores, both Marr and Morrissey have called Strangeways, Here We Come their favorite Smiths album. Appropriately, the first song released as a single after the split was announced was “I Started Something I Couldn’t Finish.” Branching out from their guitar-driven sound, Marr filled the eclectic album with keyboards, harmonica, marimba, autoharp, and other textures. Morrissey is full of almost cartoonish bile on “Unhappy Birthday” and “Death of a Disco Dancer,” but there’s tenderness and vulnerability on the swan song “I Won’t Share You.”  

Marr continued to restlessly experiment with different sounds and different collaborators after the breakup, while Morrissey has largely continued making music that sounds like the Smiths, occasionally besting Strangeways with some of his early solo albums. “The best cut on the new one is ‘Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me.’ Opening with a minute’s worth of what sounds like screaming souls caught up in the hellfire of Morrissey’s tormented psyche, the song suddenly erupts into a lush, haunting ballad–replete with strings–as Morrissey croons that last night’s pleasant dream of being held and wanted was ‘just another false alarm.’ Sigh. Big sigh,” Chris Willman wrote in the Los Angeles Times review of Strangeways, Here We Come.

3. Hatful of Hollow (1984), The World Won’t Listen (1987), and Louder Than Bombs (1987)

The Smiths wrote about 70 songs in their brief, prolific existence, only 39 of which appeared on their four proper albums. Most of the remainder that spilled out on non-LP singles were collected on three compilations: Hatful of Hollow and The World Won’t Listen in the U.K., and Louder Than Bombs in the U.S. Like many Americans, the first Smiths record I heard was Louder Than Bombs, in a friend’s car as a teenager. And it remains a great entry point for the band, despite the absence of their signature song “How Soon Is Now?” (which appeared on Hatful and early U.S. pressings of Meat is Murder). Bombs is also one of their most effectively sequenced releases, with the playful bombast of songs like “Shoplifters of the World Unite” in the first half giving way to the defeated sighs of “This Night Has Opened My Eyes” and “Unloveable.”  

Whether you prefer the U.S. compilation or its two British counterparts, you really can’t go wrong with either presentation of many of the band’s most popular songs like “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now” and “Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want.” Guitarist Craig Gannon, briefly a fifth member of the Smiths in 1986, played on just a handful of studio tracks, including the hits “Panic” and “Ask.” “Morrissey’s nattering volubility can get annoying, but the cadence itself always has its charms, and just when you think you’ve had it he gets off a good line,” Robert Christgau wrote in the Village Voice review of Louder Than Bombs. 

2. Meat is Murder (1985)

Scolding carnivores everywhere on Meat is Murder’s provocative six-minute title track, Morrissey began his long career as pop music’s most confrontational vegetarian. With the band building creative and commercial momentum after a steady stream of non-album singles, Meat is Murder knocked Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A. off the top of the U.K. charts and became the Smiths’ only No. 1 album, at least until a 1992 greatest hits compilation. 

Songwriting credits for Smiths songs always went to Marr and Morrissey, and the other half of the band’s contributions remain underdiscussed and underrated. But it’s hard to imagine songs like “The Headmaster Ritual” and “Rusholme Ruffians” sounding as good without the melodic twists and turns of Rourke’s basslines. And if Rourke ever deserved a writing credit, it was for his funky fretwork on “Barbarism Begins at Home.” “Old and lazy accusations of tears-in-my-Vimto Northern working-class self pity hitched to a one trick pony of a musical backing must now be buried: this band have come a long way since their muted, at times even moribund, debut,” Bill Black wrote in the Sounds review of Meat is Murder.

1. The Queen is Dead (1986)

The Queen is Dead’s title track might not have upset the monarchy quite as much as the Sex Pistols had nearly a decade earlier. But there’s also queer subtext in the lyric’s double meaning, with Morrissey telling an interviewer, “There’s a safety net in the song that the ‘old queen’ is me.” The second half of the album, opening with “Bigmouth Strikes Again” and “The Boy with the Thorn in His Side,” could be the strongest Side 2 in rock history, one classic after another.

The Queen Is Dead was widely recognized as the band’s pinnacle upon its release, and the album’s air of doomed romance has continued to seduce listeners for decades. “There is a Light That Never Goes Out” was released as a single in 1992 and eventually took its place as one of their defining works, the only Smiths song with a billion streams today. “I Know It’s Over,” Morrissey’s most beautiful and emotive vocal performance, has also grown in stature with covers and film syncs. “Despite their hard-earned reputation of being sad-sack mopes at best and virulent, purposefully anti-social misanthropes at worst, what people always forget when discussing the Smiths was how funny they were,” Andrew Unterberger wrote in a 2015 SPIN piece that named The Queen is Dead the fifth best album released since 1985.