With all of his irony and affectations, it can be difficult to know just how seriously to take Morrissey’s odes to loners, misfits, and heartbroken lovers. That’s not the case with “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out.”

His pleas to experience life, light, and love drip with a haunting sincerity and desperation, especially when he moans, “Oh please, don’t drop me home/Because it’s not my home, it’s their home/And I’m welcome no more.” It all comes to a head with perhaps the greatest anti-climax in musical history: “And in the darkened underpass/I thought, ‘Oh God, my chance has come at last!’/But then a strange fear gripped me/And I just couldn’t ask.” Thus, when the inevitable hyperbole does appear in the chorus — “And if a double-decker bus crashes into us/To die by your side is such a heavenly way to die” — it seems quite apropos given all of the emotional turmoil at play.

Musically, it’s as effortlessly catchy as any Smiths song, with Johnny Marr’s synths adding a tastefully elegiac quality. Indeed, Marr has admitted that when the band first played the song, he thought it was the best song he ever heard. With any other band and any other song, that might sound pretty arrogant. But the song’s enduring legacy — in 2017, Slicing Up Eyeballs polled readers to pick their favorite Smiths songs, and “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out” was the clear winner — would suggest that he wasn’t wrong.