"We were paralyzed by the dumbness of the times. So we did our best to change them." That's Morrissey, on how clueless gatekeepers blocked the Smiths' "How Soon Is Now?" from bigger commercial success, in the new book Mad World: An Oral History of New Wave Artists and Songs That Defined the 1980s. His comments here are striking partly for how little has changed—in Morrissey's telling, everyone else was wrong: the other Smiths, who were "embarrassed" by the lyrics; producer John Porter, who downplayed them; Rough Trade head Geoff Travis, who relegated the song to a UK B-side; and the American chartkeepers and TV producers, who failed to recognize the track's genius. Morrissey's remarks also stand out, though, for their optimism. All his hope might've been gone, as he sang, but he still left a scrap for the rest of us.

Though World Peace Is None of Your Business, Morrissey's first album in five years, comes in times that are undoubtedly just as dumb in their own way, the Smiths' place within them is secure. Defunct for almost three decades, the band is a perennial subject of Coachella reunion whispers. Morrissey elicits tributes in "Parks and Recreation" dialogue and Peanuts-themed Tumblr mashups alike. The gap between albums is his longest since virtually disappearing between 1997's misunderstood Maladjusted and 2004's tommy gun-blazing You Are the Quarry, but nowadays Morrissey is rarely far from the public eye, whether publishing a sometimes-brilliant memoir, canceling tour dates (while blaming the opener), or getting into it over animal rights with Jimmy Kimmel and Los Angeles' Staples Center. Remember when he appeared to start using Twitter? Then denied using Twitter? Post-financial crisis, he's as ubiquitous as global protest movements.

Tour and Twitter drama aside, the rollout of World Peace has still managed only to raise Morrissey's profile, from the album's priceless album cover and tracklist to unconventional spoken-word videos guest-starring past musical collaborator Nancy Sinatra and fellow PETA activist Pamela Anderson. The full-length itself, though—in a characteristic Morrissey twist—is hardly welcoming to newcomers. It's musically as rich and worldly as Morrissey gets, and the 55-year-old who early last year addressed another round of health concerns by quipping that "the reports of my death have been greatly understated" proves he can be as hilarious and multi-dimensional as ever. But it's also a deeply sour record, even for Morrissey. He's always had it both ways, singing his life but with a wink that resists literal interpretations; even so, this album's expressions of wide-ranging contempt are at times unbecomingly convincing.

Ever since You Are the Quarry weathered criticism for Jerry Finn's unsubtle production, Morrissey's albums have flourished sonically, and that growth is its furthest-reaching to date on World Peace. Boz Boorer, on guitar since 1992's Your Arsenal, brings a muscular continuity and sense of comfort—but keyboard/synthesizer newcomer Gustavo Manzur and producer Joe Chiccarelli (the White Stripes, Beck) go beyond the Ennio Morricone orchestral cameo from 2006's Ringleader of the Tormentors and the unpredictable luxuriance of 2009's Years of Refusal. Recorded in France, the album makes the world its business, encompassing meditative drones along with flamenco guitars and mariachi horns. It's as meticulously detailed as it is cosmopolitan, and marks the second straight Morrissey album that rewards listening without paying attention to the lyrics.

Morrissey's golden vibrato also sounds gloriously undamaged by his recent medical woes. As ever, it's most evident in his nonverbal tics—the way he stretches out the word "ways" into umpteen syllables on "Staircase at the University", an "Ask"-jaunty number about a student whose academic imperfections lead to suicide, and how he melismatically unfurls "cries" on "The Bullfighter Dies", another cheerfully morbid song cheering the perfectly Morrissey-esque subject of the title ("because we all want the bull to survive"). "Neal Cassady Drops Dead" is as jagged and punchy as its bleakly funny, faux-Beat tirade about "babies full of rabies/ Rabies full of scabies/ Scarlett has a fever.../ The little fella has got Rubella." Morrissey still knows how to be cranky with aplomb.

Still, at times the intricate arrangements come across as a means of covering up unmemorable songwriting. The murky midtempo rock of "Istanbul", about a father who identifies the body of his dead son, and the ornately textured strummer "Mountjoy", which finds grim equality in a notorious Irish prison ("We all lose/ Rich or poor"), are evidence of how these songs often tend to drag. The worst offender is nearly eight-minute centerpiece "I'm Not a Man", which grows from ambient twinkles and show-tunes crooning to gutsy modern-rock pounding and howling as Morrissey reaches new levels of self-righteousness: "I'd never kill or eat an animal/ And I never would destroy this planet I am on." All credit to Morrissey for speaking inconvenient truths, but it doesn't take joining the Koch family to possess the ability to walk out of this lecture. Forget "man"—what about "charming"?

Along with the occasional trudging bits, Morrissey's smug preachiness is the album's other off-putting point. The title track is ingeniously catchy and deeply sardonic, but dismissing protesters from Ukraine to Bahrain as "you poor little fool" and coining the mantra that "Each time you vote/ You support the process" isn't a dose of welcome realism; it's cynical and self-absorbed (Americans in Morrissey's lifetime marched and died for voting rights). The glamorous, self-mythologizing romantic melancholy that's Morrissey's stock-in-trade, meanwhile, comes up only rarely, though you can hear its echoes in the joyously "Besame Mucho"-flipping "Kiss Me a Lot," and Morrissey's exaltation of ruffians in the vaguely sexualized violence of "Smiler With Knife". The album's most miserablist songs, to use the word long applied to Morrissey's music, nevertheless zoom out for a wider view: there's the Spanish-tinged romp "Earth Is the Loneliest Planet", where "You fail as a woman/ And you lose as a man," and the pointedly dirge-like "Kick the Bride Down the Aisle", where Morrissey's scorn for institution of matrimony leaves me longing for the Hidden Cameras' more entertaining "Ban Marriage".

On finale "Oboe Concerto", which idiosyncratically leans on Boorer's sax and clarinet, Morrissey repeats, "There's a song I can't stand/ And it's stuck in my head." Beneath electronic blips and burbles, the lurching bass line is reminiscent of the Smiths' 1987 song "Death of a Disco Dancer". There, he familiarily sings: "If you think peace is a common goal/ That goes to show how little you know," adding, "Love, peace, and harmony / Oh, very nice, very nice, very nice, very nice / But maybe in the next world." Or, as he intones now, "Round, round, rhythm of life goes round." Morrissey, a wag might say, is none of our business.