MORRISSEY : MAKE-UP IS A LIE

MORRISSEY : MAKE-UP IS A LIE

You're Right, It's Time
Make-Up Is A Lie
Notre-Dame
Amazona
Headache
Boulevard
Zoom Zoom The Little Boy
The Night Pop Dropped
Kerching Kerching
Lester Bangs
Many Icebergs Ago
The Monsters Of Pig Alley

Label : Sire

Release Date : March 6, 2026

Length : 49:47

Review (Pitchfork) : Morrissey opened his third studio album, Your Arsenal, with a snarling rockabilly song called “You're Gonna Need Someone on Your Side.” Thirty-four years on, it feels like either an elaborate self-own or a self-fulfilling prophecy. Morrissey has now been solo for the best part of four decades. But, as his work has constantly shown, he is at his best with a strong creative partner, be it Johnny Marr in the Smiths, Vini Reilly on Viva Hate, or Mick Ronson on Your Arsenal. Make-Up Is a Lie, much like the singer's last decade of solo albums, affords Morrissey no such critical counterweight: While the record has moments of intrigue, inspiring melodies, and dramatic acts that speak to Morrissey’s undoubted skill as a songwriter, it always feels just a step away from plunging back into a lukewarm soup of stodgy production and lumpen lyrical choices. The return to the fold of guitarist Alain Whyte, who played with Morrissey from 1991 until 2004, however, seems to have lit an occasional spark. His presence helps steer the album away from the middling melodies and rather self-satisfied air that have plagued more recent records. Whyte’s songwriting credits include fan-favorites from happier days such as “Hold on to Your Friends” and “First of the Gang to Die.” There’s nothing quite of that standard on Make-Up Is a Lie, and little that will trouble the conscience of former fans who have been put off by the singer’s political pivot into “I do my own research” guy (and worse). But a couple of Whyte co-writes suggest that Morrissey can still raise his theatrically melancholy game when the song demands. “Boulevard,” a distant cousin to 2006’s “Life Is a Pigsty,” is particularly moving, a desperate torch-song tale of lost love and faded glamour that plays out in waltz time over a haunting piano line, bowed bass, and acoustic guitar. Say what you like about Morrissey—and people have said a lot about the singer since his politics took a turn for the unempathetic—but he can still emote his way into the darkest corners of a tune, like a man who has seen right into the emotional void. “The Monsters of Pig Alley,” which closes the album, is considerably less dramatic but feels rueful and gently self-aware in a way that brings a welcome humility to Morrissey’s tale of curdled stardom. The song might not necessarily be about Morrissey himself, but lines like “Now the phone goes unanswered in your room/When you've tasted fame . . . nothing else will do” certainly feel like the reflections of a man who was without a record label for several years before Sire stepped in. On the whole, Make-Up Is a Lie works best when Morrissey’s collaborators introduce sonic wrinkles to the mix. “Many Icebergs Ago,” which inhabits similarly grandiose territory to “Boulevard,” rides on the unlikely mixture of mandolin, upright bass, and guitar drone; “Headache” is offset by the jazzy tones of brushed drums and upright bass. And the title track features what sounds like a bouzouki riff, although it is let down by strangely disposable lyrics on what might be the least enigmatic song Morrissey has ever sung. On this evidence, it’s hard to know why make-up is a lie, or why we should care one way or the other. Whyte’s other songwriting contribution to the album, by contrast, illustrates all that can go wrong with solo Morrissey. “Notre-Dame” bobbles along on an ultra-polite disco-pop backing that suggests Maroon 5 on a no-caffeine workout, and Morrissey barely raises his vocal game beyond the absolute minimum of a somewhat aggrieved middle-aged Morrissey song. The lyrics, even if you can get around the idea that the singer appears to be suggesting a conspiracy theory about the Notre-Dame fire, are lackadaisical, the same four lines repeated ad nauseam. The most interesting thing about the song might be the scratchy, lo-fi guitar solo half way through, and that only lasts 15 seconds. At times like these, Joe Chiccarelli’s sun-smoothed production doesn’t help. “Notre-Dame” and opener “You’re Right, It’s Time” slink by with the faceless gloss of a latter-period Star Wars film, while the ’70s funk facsimile of “The Night Pop Dropped”—part of an oddly chirpy mid-section to the album alongside the Austin Powers psychedelia of “Zoom Zoom the Little Boy”—would be more convincing with a bit of dirt on its heels. There’s no grit here, no gnashing of musical teeth, and no moments of wild abandon that make you want to smear yourself into the musical soil and proclaim these songs your life. Being a Morrissey fan—lapsed or present—hasn’t been easy, and it sometimes feels like life would be more simple if Morrissey’s music was straight-out awful or offensive. Make-Up Is a Lie isn’t that; nor is it his best album in decades, a platitude that often gets wheeled out whenever Morrissey waits more than five years between releases. Make-Up is a Lie shows signs of progress and signs of regression; artful touches and clunking gaffs; soaring tunes and leaden lyrics. There’s hope in there for Morrissey and his fans. But isn’t it the hope that kills you?

Review (Paste Magazine) : Remember when Morrissey was actually good? What happened? Of course, there’s the Smiths, one of the greatest bands of all time. They’re responsible for some of the best music ever captured in a studio. From their self-titled debut to Strangeways, Here We Come, and all the compilations and one-off singles in between, you can’t deny their excellence, even if Moz’s pivot to Islamophobia, far-right ideology, Zionist outspeak, and defending sex pests sours his legacy—it really is tragic to see an artist who once felt like a beacon for outcasts turn into a repellent, but I digress. And even outside of his work with Johnny Marr, Andy Rourke, and Mike Joyce, his solo work once felt vital, too. Take songs like “Suedehead,” “Everyday Is Like Sunday” or “The Last of the Famous International Playboys,” for instance. But these days, it just sounds like the king is dead, boys. Enter his 14th solo album, Make-Up Is a Lie, produced by longtime collaborator Joe Chiccarelli. It’s rife with boring instrumentals and clunky lyrics that indulge Morrissey at his most frustratingly gauche. When he’s not canceling shows left and right, feuding with his label, or demanding his autobiography be a certified Penguin Classic, he’s penning some of the most painfully average (at best) and strikingly awful (at worst) songs of his (threateningly) burgeoning oeuvre. It has become all the more clear that when he doesn’t have a strong collaborator in, say, Johnny Marr or Boz Boorer, Morrissey succumbs to his worst impulses. Let’s start with the title track, for example. In the chorus, he repeats the refrain ad nauseam, trying on various rhythms and melodies like he’s grasping at something to say and do to fill up the time. It’s like watching a nervous stand-up comic who’s unsure what to do with their hands. Of course, Morrissey is not entirely at fault here. The song was co-written by his keyboardist Camila Grey, who shoulders at least some of the blame. Boorer, who’s widely credited for crafting Moz’s post-Smiths sound, is no longer here to rein him in. Alain Whyte, another key architect of that style, is still here, but he’s clearly underused, appearing on only five tracks, and only co-writing three. It somehow gets even worse from there. Moz has the gall to cover “Amazona” by Roxy Music, one of his favorite bands, but strip the original of nearly all its panache. It’s the best song on the album though, mainly because it’s still Roxy Music, but Moz’s graceless butchering is difficult to overlook. The following track, “Headache,” delivers on its title with a sluggish pace and four minutes of drab tedium. Whyte’s melodic guitars resurface throughout, trying to revive this corpse of a song to no avail. Despite his best efforts, it chugs along in complacency. “Boulevard” sees Morrissey adopt a nursery-rhyme scheme and schoolyard melody that plays out like Fisher-Price Baby’s First Lyrics. “Zoom Zoom the Little Boy” starts out as one of the best songs on the album, thanks to Jesse Tobias’ electric sitars providing something lively and memorable to finally grab onto, but then Morrissey opens his mouth and checks off a list of animals (“he wants to save the cats and the dogs / and the bats and the frogs / and the badgers and the hedgehogs / he wants to save the cows and the sheep / and the squiggles of the deep / and the fox with the butterflies eyes”) in such a melodramatic tone that the end result is unintentionally hilarious. He unleashes a growl (twice!) at the end that makes me wish I was listening to Samuel T. Herring sing instead. Here, we arrive at the album’s most offensive stretch of songs—not in the anti-woke, xenophobic sense that Moz loves so much, thankfully, but as strong contenders for some of the worst music in recent memory. “The Night Pop Dropped” is an unconvincing Stevie Wonder pastiche, and some chimes even pop up toward the end, as if Morrissey and co. were desperately searching for something, anything, that could redeem it. “Kerching Kerching” takes the nursery-rhyme scheme we heard earlier and somehow degrades it further with some of the laziest lyrics put to paper: “she tells you you’re not good enough, not rich enough / not man enough, not fast enough / not you enough, you don’t joke enough / because you just do not take coke enough.” Then there’s the antepenultimate “Lester Bangs,” who deserves so much more than this. Is it satire? Is it an earnest tribute? Whatever the case, Morrissey pays homage to Bangs’ pen by desecrating his name with a Great Value “Get Lucky” facsimile, dolled up in abysmal lines like “this nerd hangs on your word / I lean, and you are leaned upon.” At this point, I’d bargain that no one expects anything genuinely great to come out of a new Morrissey record. But there’s something to be said about how Make-Up Is a Lie gives us such monstrous lows. This record might be the nadir of his discography, give or take a few atrocious songs that have littered LPs like I Am Not a Dog On a Chain and California Son. It’s hard to believe that this is the man who once co-wrote songs like “This Charming Man” and “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out,” but, nevertheless, here we are. Morrissey really has outdone himself with this one, shattering all preconceived notions of his modern mediocrity. We expected something anodyne and forgettable, but what we received was far worse: an actively terrible album. Do not listen to it.

Review (The Guardian) : Pretend that you don’t know a single thing about Steven Morrissey. Then play his recent single Notre-Dame. First you’ll hear a stutter of the kind of noirish, poptimised disco that might herald a new Harry Styles number, then a tremulous, faintly glitchy voice singing about the Paris cathedral. You will probably be aware that Notre-Dame was partly destroyed in a fire in 2019. You will quickly glean that Morrissey and anonymous others believe it was no accident. “We know who tried to kill you,” he coos. “We will not be silent.” You may need to do some research to realise he is referring to the baseless claim that the fire was a deliberate act of arson covered up by the French government. You will soon be reading about conspiracy theories fuelled by rightwing commentators who suggested Islamist terrorism as a possible cause. At best, then, you could dismiss this Morrissey figure as a boomer casualty of his social media algorithm, indignation mounting as a slew of grifters convince him he is being misled by governments and the media. Or you may reasonably conclude that he is one such influencer, who has recently discovered a musical outlet for his dog-whistle views. You certainly wouldn’t suspect this to be the work of someone who once combined bookish wit, self-effacing melancholia and kitchen-sink comedy to create pop music so clever, idiosyncratic and beautiful that its very existence still beggars belief. Notre-Dame isn’t exactly a hairpin turn considering the opinions Morrissey has willingly and repeatedly shared over the past two decades, yet the song’s crude, dull fear-mongering still makes it a watershed moment. The 66-year-old will always be an icon. Now he’s also a depressing brainteaser (why has the man who did that done this?), a Rubik’s Cube you know you’ll never solve but can’t help fiddling with regardless. Fortunately, the rest of Morrissey’s 14th solo album doesn’t stray into remotely similar territory. Unfortunately, it’s called Make-Up Is a Lie, a sub sixth-form poetry tautology that in real life would be greeted with a polite grimace and an attempt to back away from the person who said it (especially were it conveyed with the same maniacal conviction as on the title track, accompanied by a plodding breakbeat and flamenco flourishes). It arrives six years after his last record, I Am Not a Dog on a Chain, a period not without industry drama: an entire album, Bonfire of the Teenagers, remains in the vaults, after Capitol abandoned a planned release and Morrissey bought the recordings back off the label (at one stage, collaborator Miley Cyrus requested her backing vocals be removed). By early 2023, another album had been completed, but a distributor could not be found. Rewritten, rerecorded and retitled (twice), it eventually landed at Sire, the Smiths’ original US label. The resulting 12 tracks never deviate far from Morrissey’s latter-day MO: ambling and grandiose, they veer between synth-pop, glam, chamber pop, indie and more. These backdrops are primarily utilitarian, designed to foreground Morrissey’s inimitable and still irresistibly maudlin vocals, strangled sighs that are nowadays mainly delivery systems for tart nostalgia and thin sentimentality. Kerching Kerching jeers at a man – once a “small boy” with a “shy smile” – ground down by a lover who appears to be the embodiment of modern capitalism’s relentless demands. Meanwhile, The Monsters of Pig Alley is addressed to an alienated pop star tempted to retreat into the arms of his pre-fame nearest and dearest, despite these uninspiring civilians being “drab … overweight and dated”. The song’s sonic loveliness is soured further by the repetition of that ludicrously disdainful title. He isn’t insightful even when doing his specialist subjects. A musical great is mourned blandly over chunky funk on The Night Pop Dropped: “How empty life would be if we had never known …” What, exactly? On Lester Bangs, the late music critic is remembered as a dishevelled, basement-dwelling drunk who apparently watches football “wrapped in an American flag”. The refrain – “how does it feel to be you, Lester Bangs?” – is opaquely rhetorical, but we do at least hear how Morrissey himself felt, as a young “nerd” hanging on Bangs’ every word: “I lean and you are leaned upon / When all my life was so wrong.” For the faithful, that nerd is still loved. A teenage shut-in unswayed by societal expectation, Morrissey inspired such devotion because he projected something exceedingly rare: uncompromised, undiluted selfhood. Yet, as he himself was well aware, his listeners never knew him. In a 1984 interview, a 25-year-old Morrissey discusses the hysterical fanmail he receives, and how he believes it’s “not really addressed to me”. So they’re writing to someone else?, asks his interlocutor. “Yeah, I do feel that,” he replies. He was right, of course. And any substantial appeal Make-Up Is a Lie holds is just a hangover from the very same love letters: residual affection for the hallucinated stranger who wrote some songs you may have once leaned upon.