A face from an old Elia Kazan film stares out from the sleeve, and the band it belongs to no longer exists. Strangeways, Here We Come, the fourth and final studio album by The Smiths, arrived on Rough Trade Records on September 28, 1987, several months after Johnny Marr had already walked away. The record was a eulogy for itself before anyone had heard a single note. Richard Davalos, the actor from East of Eden, was chosen for the cover by Morrissey, a visual decision that now feels inseparable from the melancholic strangeness of the music inside.
The group entered Wool Hall studio in Bath, Somerset in March 1987 with a contract to fulfill and a public gaze that had grown relentless after The Queen Is Dead. That previous album had turned The Smiths into something larger than an indie concern, and the attention that followed made the studio a different kind of space. Craig Gannon, the temporary rhythm guitarist, was already gone before recording began. What remained were four people trying to finish something while the ground shifted beneath them.
A stylistic shift at Wool Hall
Morrissey wrote every lyric on Strangeways, Here We Come, and Johnny Marr composed all the music, a division of labor that had defined the band from the start. But the sound they built at Wool Hall marked a stylistic shift. The arrangements reached for textures and instruments the earlier records had never touched. It was more experimental, looser in places, stranger in others, as if the pressure of being The Smiths had pushed them toward a version of themselves they hadn't yet been allowed to become.
The sessions themselves were relatively stable. No dramatic blowups, no final screaming match in the control room. Marr left the group soon after the recording was finished, announcing his departure in July 1987. By September, when the album finally appeared, The Smiths were already spoken of in the past tense. The record entered the world as an orphan, its parents separated before the birth certificate was signed.
Chart success and gold certification
The British public bought it anyway. Strangeways, Here We Come climbed to the second position in the UK chart and stayed there for seventeen weeks, a commercial performance that proved the audience hadn't abandoned the band even as the band abandoned itself. In America, the record reached the 55th spot on the Billboard Top LPs & Tape chart. The RIAA eventually certified it gold on September 19, 1990, thirty-six years ago from today's vantage point.
All four members of The Smiths have since said this is their best work. That consensus is rare for any band, let alone one that fractured before the release date. Morrissey has repeated it in interviews. Marr has stood by the songs. Mike Joyce and Andy Rourke, the rhythm section that held the whole thing together, have echoed the sentiment. The album they made while the band was quietly dissolving is the one they all point to.
A wider instrumental palette
What makes Strangeways, Here We Come feel different from The Queen Is Dead is the wider instrumental palette. There are keyboards, string-like textures, and arrangements that breathe in ways the earlier jangle-pop formula never allowed. The experimental edge doesn't come from noise or aggression; it comes from a band stretching its own vocabulary at the exact moment its vocabulary was about to be frozen forever. Thirty-nine years have passed since 1987, and the album still sounds like a door that opened onto nothing.
Thirty-nine years have passed since 1987, and the album still sounds like a door that opened onto nothing.
The cover art Morrissey designed remains one of the strangest choices in a catalog full of strange choices. Davalos, photographed from East of Eden, looks away from the camera as if already aware of the record's fate. The title itself, Strangeways, Here We Come, nods to a Manchester prison, a grim joke or a prophecy depending on how you read it. The Smiths were never subtle about their obsessions, but this sleeve carries a weight the earlier ones didn't.
Rough Trade released the record into a silence the band had already created. Marr was gone. Morrissey was moving toward a solo career. The album that could have been a new beginning became an ending instead. The question that lingers isn't whether Strangeways, Here We Come deserved better — it got the charts, the gold certification, the retrospective praise. The question is what a fifth album might have sounded like if the four of them had stayed in that Somerset studio a little longer.