Johnny Marr has spent decades using his guitar to create a language all its own. On The Age Of Everything, his fifth full-length studio album, the former Smiths guitarist channels that instinct into a record created from the tension and dizzying velocity of modern life, using that uncertainty as energy.

Written in London, road-tested during a run across the East Coast of North America and ultimately recorded in Manchester, you can feel a little bit of all three places on The Age Of Everything. The songs are lean, fast and dynamic, packed with ideas that seem to collide and crash in real time. Marr’s guitar playing remains the engine that sparks the action, but the album’s ambitions reach beyond mere fretwork. It’s a record interested in what happens when a culture moves faster than anyone can comfortably process.

The album’s title arrived early and, Marr says, became impossible to shake. “This is the record that’s been the most cathartic,” he explains. “The title came to me early in the process and became an inescapable idea.” For Marr, The Age Of Everything captures a particular cultural feeling of being surrounded by an endless stream of information, technology and possibility, with no obvious off switch.

But Marr isn't treating that overload as a purely dystopian condition. The record’s central tension comes from recognizing that the same forces capable of producing anxiety can also open unexpected doors. “It’s all encompassing, but it's not necessarily a negative statement,” he says. “There’s a sense of overwhelm in the culture brought about by technology, but looking at it with a different light, there could also be a sense of possibility.” Rather than retreat from the noise, he meets it head-on, turning cultural overload into rock and roll fuel.