Popular music has always had its great dramatists, but few have wielded their words like a stiletto quite the way Morrissey has. Now, more than five years since his last studio statement, he returns with Make-Up Is A Lie, his 14th solo album and a reunion with Sire Records, the label that released his earliest solo work and the catalog of the Smiths. History and Morrissey, it seems, are having a moment.

Recorded in France, Make-Up Is A Lie finds Morrissey in fine form across 11 new originals plus a sly, luxurious cover of Roxy Music’s “Amazona.” The title track, which doubles as the first single, glides in on infectious grooves before unfurling lyrics that interrogate artifice and identity with the arched eyebrow fans know all too well. If Make-Up Is A Lie has a message, it’s that surfaces may shine, but the truth underneath provides the strangely beautiful bruises. The French sessions lend the album a sleek, continental vibe, but the emotional terrain remains unmistakably Morrissey. Decades on, he still writes as if composing dispatches from the edge of the dance floor, where glamour and alienation share a table. The album may revisit all the familiar Morrissey themes, but it does so with renewed interest and wisdom.

Morrissey’s stature as one of the great lyricists of his generation was sealed long ago. As the frontman of the Smiths in the Eighties, his theatrical croon and literate melancholy turned songs like “Hand In Glove” into rallying cries for the romantically marooned. The band’s run, from their 1984 debut through 1986’s masterpiece The Queen Is Dead, reshaped British guitar music and built a devoted following that never wavered even after their 1987 split. For his legions of fans, Make-Up Is A Lie will feel like a continuation of an ongoing monologue, one that began in Manchester bedrooms and now echoes across four decades of alternative rock. Cosmetics may conceal. Morrissey, as ever, prefers to reveal.