Meat Is Murder

Marr made most of the demos in his Earl's Court flat and passed them to Morrissey, who lived nearby in Kensington. Morrissey supplied BBC sound-effects records for samples. The sessions ran from mid 1984 to December of that year, ending at Ridge Farm in Surrey, with Street engineering. There was no advance single in the UK, though How Soon Is Now? was reissued as a single in January 1985. The song was added to the American LP, but the original UK LP and CD left it off.

The sleeve shows US Marine Corporal Michael Wynn in a 1967 photograph, with the wording on his helmet changed to Meat Is Murder. Morrissey said the image showed that the way to end the meat industry was to give people a taste of their own medicine. Wynn said in 2019 that he had not been asked for permission. The album reached number one in Britain, displacing Bruce Springsteen's Born in the U.S.A., and stayed on the chart for 13 weeks. In the United States it reached 110.

Douglas Wolk of Pitchfork found it better recorded than the debut, but more a bunch of songs that did not fit on singles than a coherent album. He praised the chills in The Headmaster Ritual and called Barbarism Begins at Home seven minutes of tense funk, while finding the title track tedious. The BBC's Daryl Easlea wrote in 2007 that no other British group was making music quite like this in 1985. Rob Sheffield gave it two stars in the Rolling Stone Album Guide. Rolling Stone ranked it 295 in its 2003 list of the 500 greatest albums, and it appears in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die.