Context doesn’t always matter—albums have to live in the world they find themselves in. Today is today. That said, come back to 1984 with me. John Peel has been playing the first Smiths single, “This Charming Man,” and for all we know, there’s a new Afropop band from Manchester out there, and they’ve got this chatty, deep-voiced singer. Then the first album comes, and it’s both confusing and vacuum-sealed: the music tracks the words so closely. The band follows an invisible wire and the singer seems to be reciting dialogue from some unpublished play about children in peril. There is no excess—some of the songs only give you one or two bars before the singing starts. Hatful of Hollow collects all of the singles from that time, when there seemed to be a new Smiths track every week. You get all the best stuff from the debut, plus wondrous things like “How Soon Is Now?” which makes tremolo its own drum beat and constitutes a genre of one: dance anthems about shyness that make you want to dance with other people immediately. If you’re still on the fence about Morrissey, listen to this just for Johnny Marr’s guitar playing, an ecstatic tangle of highlife and lounge jazz and country that somehow still gets called rock. Hatful joins the tradition of albums like Singles Going Steady and Meaty, Beaty, Big and Bouncy, compilations of singles that make perfect albums, which in turn prove that you don’t really need albums.

– Sasha Frere-Jones