This is maybe bending the rules a bit, but - for Smiths fans in the US, "Louder Than Bombs" was a wildly important compilation, with a bunch of tracks that, up to that point, had been entirely unavailable to us. I think most folks here tend to consider it an "album", at least unofficially...and it's so chock full of indispensable tracks that, even now, as a Smiths completist, it might be the thing I cite as my favorite Smiths release.
That said...it also contains the one real clunker in their catalog, "Golden Lights", a cover so ill-advised that it basically precipitated their break-up. (Yes, I think it's worse than "Death at One's Elbow" or "Meat is Murder".) It's just, so...un-Smiths. It's a weak song, they used a weird flanging effect on Morrissey's vocals, and Marr may as well not have been in the room. Nothing about it fits - not just in the context of the "Louder Than Bombs" (though it was admittedly not created for that), but, I think, in the context of their entire catalog.
