The Smiths existed from 1982 to 1987. Five years. Four studio albums. A greatest hits collection that became one of the best-selling albums in UK history. And then they were done — Morrissey and Marr couldn't stand each other anymore, or couldn't stand what each other had become, and the band ended the way bands end: not with a dramatic final show but with a quiet implosion in a studio.
In those five years, The Smiths invented a template for a certain kind of English sadness that has been copied by approximately ten thousand bands since. The formula: Marr's guitar work — jangly, layered, more complex than it sounds — under Morrissey's vocals, which were theatrical in a way that somehow never felt fake. The lyrics were about loneliness, about desire, about the specific texture of being young and awkward in a northern English city where it rained constantly. They were funny, too, in a way that people who only know the memes don't always realize. "Girlfriend in a Coma" is a genuinely amusing song if you let it be.
Writing about The Smiths in 2025 means writing around Morrissey, who has spent the decades since the band's breakup becoming increasingly difficult to defend. The political positions, the comments, the affiliations — it's a conversation that doesn't have a clean resolution and isn't going to get one. But the band predates all of that. The Smiths, the actual band, the four-piece that recorded The Queen Is Dead, exists in a period before the narrative got complicated. The music is from before.
The shirts are from before, too. A vintage Smiths tee is a document of the band as a band — not Morrissey the solo act, not the reunion that never happened, not the discourse. Just the music and the image and the particular feeling of hearing "There Is a Light That Never Goes Out" for the first time and knowing, immediately, that something had changed in your understanding of what a pop song could do.
This one is vintage. There's one.
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Header image: Photo: Paul Cox / Sire Records, Public Domain