The Smiths

The Queen Is Dead (1986)

Stephen Street's production gave The Queen Is Dead a rawer, more direct sound than Meat Is Murder, and it suits the material: Morrissey had never been more nakedly literary or more sharply funny, and Marr had never played with more rhythmic momentum. The title track careens through a guitar attack with Morrissey raging at the monarchy and his own desolation simultaneously; 'There Is a Light That Never Goes Out' is the pop apex, making teenage yearning feel enormous and universal. Frequently cited as the greatest British album ever made — and unlike most such claims, that is not obviously wrong.

Sleeve notes

The Queen Is Dead · 1986

The Smiths resolved a tension that seemed irresolvable: Morrissey's literary self-pity and bedroom despair married to Johnny Marr's exultant, sunlit jangle, and somehow the combination produced music that was simultaneously the most melancholic and the most joyful thing British indie had managed. The Smiths (1984), Meat Is Murder (1985), The Queen Is Dead (1986), and Strangeways, Here We Come (1987) — four studio albums in four years, each essentially complete, each finding new things to do with the same vocabulary.

The specificity of Morrissey's lyrics — Oscar Wilde quotations, provincial disaffection, suburban loneliness — prevented the music from generalizing into mere sadness, and the emotional precision made the despair funny in a way that still disarms people hearing it for the first time. Marr's guitar parts, which sound inevitable, were actually elaborately constructed: overdubbing four or five guitar tracks, using open tunings, playing lines that functioned as both melody and rhythm simultaneously. No band has been more cited as formative by British indie artists across three subsequent generations.