What Is The Best Smiths Album? All 4 Studio Albums, Ranked

The Smiths’ debut album chiselled out a precise vision for the band – a kitchen sink antithesis to pop and its cop-out lyrics. Most of the songs were cooked up in a dimlit terrace one drizzling afternoon after only half an hour of Morrissey and Marr meeting, however, the album doesn’t seem to capture the sheer explosion of the duo’s creative reactivity.

Tracks like “You’ve Got Everything Now” and “Miserable Lie” show a kind of flatness, and don’t soar like the cultural artefact that is Marr’s “This Charming Man” intro, or the Taste of Honey elegy “Hand in Glove”. This was largely due to production struggles – before the intervention of producer John Porter, the ill-fated Troy Tate sessions left the album sounding more like the basement recordings of a talent show college band.

That said, this album was our introduction to the romantically cynical, loving-and-loathing aesthetic of The Smiths, whose lasting societal impact is synonymous with that of The Beatles or The Rolling Stones.

Meat is Murder cast a cultural tsunami on the stuck-in-its-ways 80s when vegetarianism and environmental concern were no more than a running joke. It was The Smiths’ only number one album, which is ironic considering its technical imperfections. It doesn’t flow as well as the lyrical storybook that is The Queen is Dead, and it doesn’t venture too far beyond their comfort zone like Strangeways, but it spearheaded counter culture with its boat-rocking politics, leaving Radio 2 DJs feeling socially executed.

The opening track “The Headmaster Ritual” is perhaps the greatest opener to an album (threatened only by “The Queen is Dead”), wherein Morrissey explores being browbeaten at the arbitrary whim of self-important authority, his maudlin musings setting poetry alight to the juxtaposition of Marr’s sunny guitar rhythms (which took two years to perfect). Marr then quickens the tempo with his rockabilly, reworked-Elvis song “Rusholme Ruffians”: an energetic binary to the haunting signing-off track “Meat is Murder” which penned The Smiths into history books.

Strangeways, Here We Come was the band’s indelible farewell to the music world, sending Britain’s indie kids into a state of coma-like mourning. Although it was their final album, it shows anything but a drought of creativity, featuring some of their most accomplished tracks such as the fatally underrated “Paint A Vulgar Picture”, the swooningly cinematic “Death of a Disco Dancer”, and Morrissey and Marr’s agreed upon favourite “Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me”.

This song demonstrates a masterfully intricate and well-blended vision that certainly doesn’t reflect the creative tensions the band were undergoing at the time. Everything from the loudening, dole-age murmurs of the battle of Orgreave to the crescendo of Morrissey’s insatiable yearning, all adorned with Marr’s melodramatic orchestra which plays like the soundtrack to some gorgeous cult film. The Smiths have always refused the rinse-and-repeat formula of other bands, breaking new ground with each album. Strangeways, although somewhat bittersweet, is their cherished parting gift.

Though the band members themselves may disagree, I firmly believe that The Queen is Dead is The Smiths’ impenetrable magnum opus. The title track is a peacocking display of Morrissey’s lyrical and comedic excellence, and amongst other tracks it is fittingly severed from the apron strings of the pop charts with its 6 minute long anti-chorus approach. Similarly, the heart-clenching monologue of “I Know it’s Over” spotlights Morrissey’s vocal abilities. Unlike his usual angelic baritone or unprovoked shrieks, his voice reaches more desperate notes – notes lightly grazed in fellow masterpiece “Meat is Murder”.

Marr’s personal high point is the jangly, intricately-woven riff of “Some Girls are Bigger Than Others”. Many people think that Morrissey tainted Marr’s work with supposedly lazy comedy, but even after years of hostility Marr said in response to the track “I absolutely encouraged and backed up everything Morrissey did and was really, really happy to do so.”

Although Punk was dead and buried, this album shows Morrissey coming back with Wildely poetic lyrics and more profound philosophies on life, offering a wittier counterpart to “God Save The Queen”, and serving the public counter culture on a silver platter.

When discussing the band’s masterpieces, it’s hard not to mention the self-parodic “Bigmouth Strikes Again”, or the unapologetic self-importance of "Cemetery Gates”. Filler songs have fallen through the cracks and left an album, which in all its anti-royalism, remains a jewel-encrusted treasure.