I’m as shocked as the rest of the Mozziverse that the man’s never recorded a Bond theme. As far as I can tell, he’s never even been approached for the task. Southpaw Grammar’s opener shows just how powerful the result could be. “The Teachers Are Afraid of the Pupils” is underpinned by a resolving string sample from the first movement of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony #5 in D, with Morrissey contributing a wearied, yet ominous performance, letting phrases hang in fog. After crawling on toms for the first half, Spencer Corbin joins the rock attack with wide-open high hat and a four-on-the-floor march. With a total thematic shift, the line “to be finished would be a relief” could serve as subtext for a Bond actor nearing the end of his term. But, of course, then the song wouldn’t be an eleven-minute epic about predatory educators receiving a just end.

Southpaw Grammar is peak Morrissey. His outsider advocacy and bared-teeth grin is backed by a musical unit honed by world touring, eager to follow its chief to the ends of acceptable song length. This is the record with a two-minute drum solo in the middle and a ten-minute song at each end. There are no ballads, there is no self-conscious reaching for either his flash or jangle periods. Instead, he and the band mixed the two — with startling portions of orchestral instrumentation and proggy experiment tossed in — with the result being a stirring, full-throated rock record. Speaking of throats, Morrissey — always prone to illness — suffered from colds during the sessions, resulting in some compellingly ragged vocals in spots. It lends the record a bite akin to the glove of coverboy Kenny Lane, who went 15 rounds in Joe Brown’s successful defense of his lightweight title, prompting the champ to groan, “They should take all southpaws and drop them in the river.”

“[T]he aim with Southpaw,” Morrissey wrote in the liner notes to the 2009 reissue, “was to allow the musicians more room to breathe and blow like killer whales.” And, er, blow they did. “Boy Racer” rides on the rails laid by Boz Boorer’s palm muting; producer Steve Lillywhite keeps Alain Whyte’s first solo back in the mix before releasing a strangled, proto-Cuomo thing. The subject of a strobe-and-Marshall loaded video, it also features this delightfully spiteful couplet: “He thinks he’s got the whole world in his hands/ Stood at the you-rye-null”. “The Operation” begins with Cobrin’s startling solo (palate-cleansing, perhaps, or just completely out of place), shifts to a strutting, “London Calling”-style kiss-off, then punches into a final section that’s damn near pop-punk. Here and throughout the album, Whyte contributed backing vocals by howling into the pickup of his Bigsby guitar: a remarkable effect. Bassist Jonny Bridgwood leads off “Do Your Best and Don’t Worry,” then hangs back to surge against Morrissey’s slightly negging buck-up text. Album closer “Southpaw” straddles the tonal poles of guitar, with gravedigging clusters alternating with high-end sonar pings. Whyte’s solo scrapes against the evening sky while Bridgwood works a doomy progression.

As for the man himself, he put forth perhaps his most lacerating texts. “The Teachers Are Afraid of the Pupils” is a devastating salvo at abuse in the state schools of his youth. But it’s an outlier. The bulk of the record is given over to less than sympathetic portraits of kids unaware of an brutal advancing future. Like a Holden Caulfied uninterested in — or incapable of — saving any others, Morrissey positively sneers at the narrowed horizons of his objects of address. The subject of “Dagenham Dave” (which could be 1. a real person 2. a reference to the possibly Mancunian man in the ‘77 Stranglers song of the same name 3. a nod at naval slang, in which Dagenham is just a tube stop away from Barking) has two girlfriends, a “mouthful of pie,” and “never the need to fight or question a single thing”: at least two strikes in Mozz’s scorecard. (The tune pairs excellently with its b-side, “Nobody Loves Us,” with a soaring vocal that resists pity and its complementary references to pie eyes and cake-eaters.) “The Operation” shreds some soul who got pretentious and came back to tell everyone about it. “Everyone here is sick to the tattoo of you,” snarls the tough-guy singer. Lest the listener share in the snark, “Reader Meets Author” is there guarding the second-track gate. Eighteen years on, the mentions of the year 2000 and people hiding behind software are entertaining, rather than barely the wrong side of prescient, but “you don’t know a thing about their lives” drives the wedge as neatly as anything the man’s written.

Southpaw Grammar was Morrissey’s sole full-length on RCA, the label that issued the Bowie records of his youth. (In 2009, Southpaw was reissued with the title’s typeface changed to resemble that of Changesbowie and Station to Station.) Just a couple years prior, he’d hinted in interviews at an imminent retirement. Now he’d landed a knockout combo: releasing his most beloved solo work and his most accomplished back to back. A February tour to promote his single “Boxers” was the first to feature Smiths songs; a series of November dates saw him opening for Bowie himself, although in more cavernous environs, the bounds of his fans’ ardor was keenly felt. (Gone were the fake bruises he wore in February.) The Smiths’ legacy was less a weight and more a relic with each passing year. Southpaw Grammar was a singular achievement: a far-ranging record that circled around well-explicated themes. It is the quintessential Morrissey document.