Johnny Marr, pochette The Age Of Everything, BMG
Johnny Marr released his fifth solo album, The Age of Everything, on October 2 — his first in four years. The former Smiths guitarist calls it the most cathartic songwriting of his career: ten tracks built around the sensory overload of modern city life, and the brief moments of calm that cut through it.
A record written on the road
The Age of Everything started in London, was reshaped live during a tour across the East Coast of North America, and was finished back in Manchester, where Marr’s career began. The title, he says, sums up a feeling a lot of people share right now: a sense of cultural overwhelm driven by technology, without that necessarily reading as negative. There’s room in it for possibility too — a tension between speed and clarity that runs through the whole record.
What comes through is something very tangible: the electric energy of a contemporary city, its friction, its constant motion. Marr has always been a guitarist of the moment, able to turn a simple melody into an instantly recognisable signature. At 62, this new album proves that instinct hasn’t faded one bit.
Spin, Ophelia and the rest of the tracklist
The album opens with “Spin”, chosen as lead single and conceived by Marr himself as a statement of intent: a tense, jangly pop track about a mind overwhelmed by too much coming in. The video, also conceptualised by Marr, was shot in Manchester.
The rest of the tracklist moves between urgency and introspection:
- Spin
- Beyond The Rain
- It’s Time
- How Come
- Ophelia
- That Feeling
- In And Out Of Love
- Just Once More
- Fire With Fire
- All In A Life
“It’s Time” got its own video, filmed during a homecoming show at Manchester’s Castlefield Bowl. “Ophelia”, inspired directly by the Shakespearean character, came with an official lyric visualiser — Marr’s way of extending each song beyond the listen itself.
Another chapter for the ex-Smiths guitarist
Since the Smiths split in 1987, Johnny Marr has kept building a quiet but steady solo catalogue, from The Messenger (2013) to Call The Comet (2018) and Fever Dreams Pts 1-4 (2022). The Age of Everything fits that same pattern: a musician who moves forward through fully realised albums rather than one-off moments, widening his sonic signature record by record without ever betraying it.
Between solo records, Marr has never really stopped collaborating: the Electronic project with New Order’s Bernard Sumner in the 1990s, stints with The Cribs and Modest Mouse in the 2000s, before returning fully to his own name from 2013 onward. That ability to reinvent himself without losing his guitar signature explains why every new release still gets attention well beyond Smiths diehards.
The Castlefield Bowl show, where the “It’s Time” video was filmed, had already set the tone: a packed outdoor crowd in the neighbourhood where Marr grew up. That same local rootedness, worn plainly rather than played up for nostalgia, runs through The Age of Everything from first track to last.
It also lands at a moment when British guitar music has been leaning back toward songcraft over spectacle, with veteran acts and newer indie and post-punk bands alike favouring direct, well-built records over oversized statements. Marr, who has spent four decades shaping that very sound from the inside, doesn’t need to chase a trend he helped create. The Age of Everything simply does what his best work has always done: take a feeling that is hard to name and put it inside a melody that sticks.
Out now via BMG, the record confirms that nearly forty years on from The Queen Is Dead, Johnny Marr’s songwriting remains one of the steadiest things in British rock.
