In 2011, Morrissey published a list of the 10 albums from his back catalogue "of which I am most proud". It offered what you might charitably describe as a unique interpretation of where Morrissey's career highlights lay. The Smiths releases on which his reputation is usually seen to rest were nowhere to be seen, nor was his acclaimed solo debut Viva Hate. His three most recent albums occupied the top three places, with the most recent of them all, 2009's Years of Refusal, in with a bullet at No 1.

Perhaps understandably, the list was greeted with a degree of bemusement. Some voices suggested Morrissey was once more trolling: here was a kind of discographical equivalent of his deliberately inflammatory stuff about how eating a fish finger is as bad as paedophilia. Three years on, however, the release of World Peace Is None of Your Business suggests he really meant it. In the absence of many memorable songs, the striking thing about Years of Refusal was its wilful sonic unpleasantness, as if his latterday backing band had decided to grasp the nettle of the criticisms leveled at them – largely unflattering comparisons of their hamfisted approach with the deftness and subtlety of the Smiths – by sounding as thuggish and ungainly as possible.

Dense and forbidding, World Peace Is None of Your Business amps up that approach even further. Gusts of electronic noise blow through the songs, a didgeridoo groans mournfully, the drumming is sometimes coated with a layer of fuzz and often collapses into lugubrious stamping, and the guitars seem to spend as much time clanking, humming and shrieking with feedback as they do being played; when they are, they're often distorted to the point at which they sound decayed. Grumbling noise and a cacophony of screams, feedback and atonal honking sax bookend even the most melodically beautiful track, the showtune-like I'm Not a Man, on which the singer explains at length that he doesn't conform to standard macho stereotypes. Clearly this is all going to come as a massive shock to anyone who was expecting Morrissey to turn up at the next Tough Mudder race dressed as the Incredible Hulk.

It's a better album than Years of Refusal partly because songs such as Smiler With Knife and Staircase at the University are melodically stronger – they don't sink under the sheer weight of their arrangements – and partly because it feels more spectacular and colourful than its oppressively grey predecessor. That may be down to Gustavo Manzur, a multi-instrumentalist who's replaced long-term collaborator Alain Whyte in Morrissey's backing band, bringing with him not merely the aforementioned digeridoo, but accordion, trumpet, flamenco guitar and presumably the saz-like instrument that twangs away during Istanbul. Whatever the reason, the whole thing sounds more tumultuous than trudging. Tumultuous enough, in fact, that you're occasionally struck by the rare sensation that you're listening to a Morrissey album on which Morrissey's presence isn't central to your enjoyment.

Lyrically, his genius flickers often enough to remind you how great he can be. There's a punch-in-the-stomach potency about Mountjoy – "What those in power do to you reminds us at a glance/ How humans hate each other's guts and show it given a chance" – while Kiss Me a Lot's "Kiss me all over my face /Kiss me all over the place" is pretty droll stuff. And if you fondly remember the Smiths as not merely a band, but a doorway that led you to discover literature and films, well, something similar happens on Neal Cassady Drops Dead. It wryly depicts Allen Ginsberg reacting to his former lover's passing not just with sadness but nostalgic lust ("Allen Ginsberg is hosed down in a barn … Allen Ginsberg's howl becomes a growl") which is pretty much exactly what happened, as anyone familiar with Ginsberg's vividly filthy poem On the Ashes of Neal Cassady will tell you.

Or at least, it does at first. The song's second half devolves into a rant apparently concerned with how much Morrissey hates children, who are depicted as little harbingers of disease ("Get that thing away from me"). It highlights one noticeable absence from World Peace Is None of Your Business: a distinct lack of the kind of empathy or insight that made the lyrics of November Spawned a Monster or Suffer Little Children such extraordinary pieces of writing. Its non-appearance is what separates Kick the Bride Down the Aisle from 1984's ostensibly similarly-themed William, It Was Really Nothing. The latter is a beautifully drawn vignette in which an unwise marriage symbolises the limitations of life in a humdrum town; the former is just a load of bile hurled at a woman, in keeping with the endless expressions of revulsion in Autobiography, further hampered by the fact that this time around, most of Morrissey's witticisms aren't witty: "Kick the bride down the aisle/ Look at that cow … in the field" can take its place alongside Earth Is the Loneliest Planet's "humans are not really very humane" and the groaning puns on Spanish names in The Bullfighter Dies.

In fairness, empathy isn't missing entirely – he manages to scare up some for the errant father seeking his vanished son in the fantastic Istanbul – but it's in desperately short supply, and when it turns up, it often seems to come out wrong, as if he doesn't really mean it. You can quarrel for ever about the wisdom of Morrissey instructing his fans not to vote on the title track, but what follows is inarguably trite and hollow. "Brazil and Bahrain/ Oh Egypt, Ukraine/ So many people in pain," he sings. It's tempting to imagine the widespread ridicule if, say, Jessie J or the guy out of Kasabian had come up with that.

But then he hits you with something like the closing Oboe Concerto, a brilliant, vivid rumination on mortality that genuinely deserves the adjective Larkinesque: "The older generation have tried, sighed and died/ Which pushes me to their place in the queue." It's the kind of thing that serves notice that, on a good day, Morrissey is still uniquely gifted. As with nearly every artist in rock history, nearly 35 years after his debut, the good days come around less frequently than they did, but it's still worth hanging around to witness them. Not as great as you might have hoped, but far better than you might have feared, a little more reliant on others than a man who ended his Autobiography claiming that "I have never had anything in my life that I did not make for myself" might care to admit, World Peace Is None of Your Business may be as good as it gets at this stage in his career, which is good enough.