Recently, Morrissey released a new album, and honestly, I don't know what to make of it. Make-Up Is a Lie is one of those albums you'd prefer didn't exist: naive, full of internet conspiracy theories, with no spark at all. And considering Morrissey is 65 years old, nobody expected him to repeat Viva Hate or Vauxhall and I, but when you listen to what he’s come out with, it’s hard not to feel that something broke along the way.

The strange thing is that Morrissey is still Morrissey. The guy who defined the sensibility of pop over the last 45 years, who wrote Irish Blood, English Heart and First of the Gang to Die, who attacked Margaret Thatcher when it was dangerous to do so. That same guy who, in 2025, canceled roughly half of his scheduled concerts, including two consecutive shows in Buenos Aires. Noel Gallagher from Oasis said he ran into him at a bar on the same night Morrissey had canceled a concert due to a supposedly mysterious angina.

Things get even stranger when you learn about his recent moves. At the end of 2024, Morrissey announced he had rejected a multimillion-dollar offer to reunite The Smiths because Johnny Marr, his guitarist and longtime rival, ignored him. Later, it was revealed that it was all a fabrication by Morrissey to reignite a feud that’s been dormant for decades. The tension relates to his current political stances: alleged rapprochement with Reform UK, the British right-wing. Although he later clarified that he is apolitical, he talks about the dictatorship of thought control, constantly attacks The Guardian accusing them of hate campaigns, and in April 2025, he sued an internet user for labeling him racist.

Here’s the weird part: Morrissey built his reputation by attacking Margaret Thatcher’s capitalism. He dedicated Margaret on the Guillotine to that in his first solo album. The British police raided his home under the Explosive Substances Act because they thought he was a threat to the Prime Minister. When Thatcher died in 2013, he published an incendiary open letter. That was Morrissey.

So the question is complicated: what happens when the guy who criticized 80s fascism ends up seeming like a disoriented boomer rock artist? Can a bad album help us understand a great artist? Probably not. Maybe the best thing is just to listen to it, without trying to justify or condemn anything. Although Make-Up Is a Lie makes that difficult. Perhaps the best is to let it pass, act as if nothing happened.