MORRISSEY-Make-Up-Is-a-Lie-album-2026
The fourteenth chapter of the discography of Morrisseythe exhausting and long-delayed “Make-Up Is a Lie”is not so much an album as an architecture of resentment elevated to a system of thought.
Recorded in the Provençal sanctuary of Studio La Fabrique, the album is the triumph of a hypertrophic solitude where, under the aegis of a Joe Chiccarelli far too condescending, Moz sets up a staging in which theatrics no longer serve to reveal truth, but to strengthen the bunker of his own enormous ego.
The background rumble is persistent on the lyrical level. The opening lines immediately offer the measure of his state of mind: “I want to get away from those who stare at screens all day / I want to speak and not be trapped by censorship / in search of wisdom far wiser than my own / I want to let someone love me if they can't.”
When he's not aiming at specific targets, including the rock critic Lester Bangswho receives a dissing-tribute almost forty-five years after his death as if in a duel with a ghost, it becomes clear that his only true interlocutor is a mythical past in which he remains the only martyr worthy of canonization.
The twelve songs that make up the album cross an eclectic mosaic of genres: post-punk, chanson, soul-disco. At sixty-six, Morrissey retains a refined, velvety voice, with which he croons his classic repertoire of desperation, defiance, devotion, contempt and humor into a microphone he always seems to love more than humans.
If the pen is dipped in gall and in an increasingly marked conspiracy vein, the hand of historical collaborators such as Alain Whyte and Jesse Tobias tries to save what can be saved with an almost resigned elegance, weaving sound plots that attempt to give direction to this flow of recriminations.
The cover of Amazon of the Roxy Music it is a philological tribute that shines with lucidity: a moment in which Morrissey allows himself the luxury of being “only” an excellent interpreter, abandoning the role of professional polemicist for a few minutes.
The closure entrusted to The Monsters of Pig Alley it is instead an essay in sound dramaturgy that reminds us why, despite the ideological drift and an increasingly toxic narcissism, his voice remains an instrument of ancestral and ferocious beauty, capable of vibrating even when it rests on the pneumatic vacuum of a now exhausted rhetoric.
Morrissey no longer sings for someone, but against an era that has committed the mortal sin of ceasing to recognize him as its only, legitimate oracle.
And perhaps it is precisely for this reason that despite everything we continue to listen and love it, in the end “Make-Up Is a Lie”!!!
SCORE: 7.25
THE VOTES OF OTHERS
Mojo – Rating 8.00
Record Collector – Rating 6.00
Rolling Stone – Rating 5.00
TO LISTEN NOW
You're Right, It's Time – Boulevard – The Night Pop Dropped
TO BE SKIPPED IMMEDIATELY
We never regret just under an hour of Moz!
TRACKLIST
You're Right, It's Time
Make-Up Is a Lie
Notre Dame
Amazon (Roxy Music cover)
Headache
Blvd
Zoom Zoom the Little Boy
The Night Pop Dropped
Kerching Kerching
Lester Bangs
Many Icebergs Aug
The Monsters of Pig Alley
DISCOGRAPHY
1988 – Long live Hate
1991 – Kill Uncle
1992 – Your Arsenal
1994 – Vauxhall and I
1995 – Southpaw Grammar
1997 – Maladjusted
2004 – You Are the Quarry
2006 – Ringleader of the Tormentors
2009 – Years of Refusal
2014 – World Peace Is None of Your Business
2017 – Low in High School
2019 – California Son
2020 – I Am Not a Dog on a Chain
2026 – Make-Up Is a Lie
WEB & SOCIAL
@officialmoz
facebook.com/Morrissey
twitter.com/officialmoz
