The Age Of Everything

On a warm May night in 2026, the making of Johnny Marr’s fifth solo album came to completion with a final polish at a mastering session at Abbey Road. As he walked home through Northwest London at 1 am, something suddenly struck Marr about the record. “I felt that I’d said what I needed to say about the last couple of years of my life and how I see the world,” he tells Apple Music. “I didn’t realise going into it that I had so much to get off my chest.” On The Age of Everything, that includes putting an arm around the shoulders of struggling souls (“How Come”, “That Feeling”), confronting rampant capitalism and prejudice with insurrectionary zeal (“It’s Time”, “Fire with Fire”) and paying tribute to a lost friend (“Beyond the Rain”). Naturally, it’s all rendered in kaleidoscopic guitar music, the bleaker moments often leavened by lifting melodies. Marr road-tested eight of the 10 songs on tour during late 2025 and early 2026, finessing hooks, tempos and lyrics with each performance. It’s helped create one of his strongest solo albums. “It was my intention to do what I’ve been doing over all the other records but do it even more so,” he says. “A friend of mine described the record as ‘emphatic’, and I quite like that.” It’s also the product of a songwriter who, despite his unimpeachable status as one of British pop’s most influential artists, is always striving for progress. “I want to have goals and feel like I’m getting better and better all the time, and doing something different,” he says. “I don’t feel like the finished article and I hope I never do.” Read on as he takes us through The Age of Everything, track by track. “Spin” “For the longest time, I was singing the verses too melodically, and there wasn’t enough contrast [with the chorus]. It’s quite a tricky thing for a songwriter, to be critical of something that’s really melodic. I had to keep going back and making the verse work better to set up the chorus. I made ‘Spin’ almost conversational. It’s som