Morrissey in His Contradiction: When a Failed Album Becomes a Reason to Talk About a Legendary Artist

Some artists deserve to be talked about even when they do wrong. Morrissey is precisely one of those cases. At 65, the British singer has just released Make-Up Is a Lie, a record that functions more as a question than an achievement. Paradoxically, this failure offers the perfect opportunity to reflect on who Morrissey really is after four decades of shaping the sound and sensibility of melodic pop rock.

The artistic failure of the new Morrissey

Make-Up Is a Lie is not just a bad album. It’s something more confusing: a project that claims to have serious intentions but ends up being tedious, naively nostalgic, saturated with conspiracy theories typical of the internet, visually unappealing, and fundamentally lacking musical sense. Nothing about it evokes the brilliance of his previous works.

No one expected Morrissey to replicate the perfection of Viva Hate (1988), Vauxhall and I (1994), or You Are the Quarry (2004). These albums represent unrepeatable moments in his solo career, following the transformative impact of The Smiths. At 65, Morrissey has the right to experimentation and mistakes. The problem is that this record not only fails artistically: it exposes the fragility of someone who built his legacy on foundations that now seem undermined.

Cancellations and Morrissey’s health

In 2025, Morrissey canceled about half of his scheduled concerts. Among them was his return to Buenos Aires, where he had previously missed performances. Professionally, this is unusual for an artist of his stature. But from a more human perspective, there’s something almost admirable in Morrissey’s decision to simply refuse to do something because he lacks the motivation.

What’s peculiar is that his excuses about health problems take on almost anecdotal tones. Noel Gallagher, former guitarist of Oasis, surprisingly recounted how he ran into Morrissey at a bar on the same night the singer had canceled a concert supposedly due to angina. These episodes paint a picture of someone who has turned failing to fulfill obligations into part of his public narrative.

Morrissey’s political shift: from revolutionary to questioned

The deepest contradiction surrounding Morrissey lies in his political evolution. At the end of 2024, he claimed to have received a multimillion-dollar offer to reunite The Smiths in 2025, but Johnny Marr, his former guitarist and current antagonist, ignored it. It was later revealed that Morrissey fabricated the story to rekindle old conflicts that had been dormant for decades.

The so-called “current political positions” that separate the two musicians include Morrissey’s alleged rapprochement with the right-wing party Reform UK. Although the singer described himself as “apolitical” in several interviews last year, his subsequent speeches constantly talk about a “thought police dictatorship” and warn about the destruction of British culture. Attacking The Guardian, accusing it of launching a “hate campaign” against him, became part of his usual rhetoric. In April 2025, Morrissey sued an internet user, claiming that this “troll” was responsible for constructing his image as a “racist” to the world over decades.

This is especially contradictory considering Morrissey built his artistic reputation on political criticism of capitalism during Margaret Thatcher’s regime in England. His first solo album included “Margaret on the Guillotine,” a song so incendiary that the British police raided his house under the Explosive Substances Act, believing the singer posed a real threat to the Prime Minister. Songs like “The Queen Is Dead” directly attacked the monarchy and Britain’s decline under conservative rule. Even “Meat Is Murder,” though formally about vegetarianism, Morrissey used in his speeches as a symbol of the “lack of humanity” of the Thatcher government.

When Margaret Thatcher died in 2013, Morrissey published a scathing open letter titled “Thatcher was a terrorist with not an atom of humanity,” showing that his disdain remained intact. The same Morrissey now denounces a “thought police dictatorship” and aligns himself with right-wing political groups.

The enigma of understanding Morrissey

Is Morrissey a “right-winger,” using the banal terms of today’s era? The reality is that the universe of Moz — as his most devoted followers call him — cannot be reduced to a single, coherent logic. Perhaps the true conclusion is that he shouldn’t be understood, justified, or condemned. Just listen to him, accepting all his contradictions.

Yet, there is Make-Up Is a Lie, and the uncertainty about what to do with it is inevitable. Ignoring it, pretending it never happened, might be the wisest advice. But the existence of this failed record paradoxically allows us one last meaningful conversation about Morrissey: not about what he is, but about what he was and what his disintegration represents. A bad album from a great artist still remains an opportunity to remember why that artist mattered in the first place.