Strangeways Here We Come review: Is The Smith's final album their greatest work?

Following The Queen is Dead, without a doubt one of the best albums of all time, was always going be a tough job for Manchester quintet The Smiths. Strangeways Here We Come, their fourth and final record released in 1987, was a darker, more subtle piece of music, dividing critics but selling millions. Whether it ended The Smith’s short career with their best album is a debate which continues today, but there’s no doubt that Strangeways Here We Come features some of the best musical moments of the 1980’s.

By the time Strangeways Here We Come was released, The Smith’s had split up after years of tension between legendary singer Morrissey and guitarist Johnny Marr. But while you might expect this posthumous album to leak with the sound of a band falling apart, the record mysteriously represents The Smith’s at their most musically united. The songs are tight and generally short, several clocking in at less than three minutes long, creating a quick and fast-paced experience.  Musically this is the band at their best, with Morrissey’s dark lyrics and Marr’s soft, harmless music violently clashing in principle but creating a deep, rich sound which has been regularly imitated but never equalled.  This is particularly obvious on the album’s lead single, Girlfriend in a Coma, but it appears on the vast majority of the ten tracks in a less blatant form. The sardonic subtlety in Morrissey’s lyrics leads to some of the most striking moments of The Smith’s career, as “I still love you only slightly less than I used to” on Stop Me If You Think You’ve Heard This One Before quietly mocking traditional ballads, and “If you should die I may feel slightly sad but I won’t cry” on Unhappy Birthday feeling as shocking and surprising as any expletive driven stanza from your run-off-the-mill heavy metal band.

This is not a perfect album however; it may be lyrically stunning but it lacks the charisma and variety that made The Queen is Dead so fantastic. The tension between music and lyrics is overused and becomes predictable in the record’s later stages, making the music less memorable and captivating. It also lacks the range of themes and styles which filled The Queen is Dead, and the overbearingly morbid lyrics and less interesting guitar parts make the album rather samey and forgettable by comparison to their previous effort.

Strangeways Here We Come is still an excellent record with plenty of great moments and some of the best lyrics ever penned. However, its limited themes and musical diversity prevent it from becoming the iconic classic that The Queen is Dead was.

7/10