The Queen Is Dead opens with a sample of Cicely Courtneidge singing "Take Me Back to Dear Old Blighty" before a feedback-drenched drum pattern crashes in and the title track erupts with a ferocity that still shocks. It is the most aggressive thing The Smiths ever recorded, Johnny Marr's guitar churning through a riff that owes as much to the Stooges as to the jangle pop the band had become associated with. Over the top, Morrissey delivers a withering assault on the monarchy, the establishment, and the entire rotten edifice of 1980s Britain. It is magnificent, furious, and funny all at once.
But The Queen Is Dead is not simply an angry record. It is a record of extraordinary emotional range, shifting from savage satire to devastating tenderness within the space of a single side. "I Know It's Over" is one of the most harrowing songs ever committed to tape — Morrissey's voice rising from a murmur to a barely controlled howl as the arrangement builds from a single bass note to a full orchestral swell. The way Marr layers his guitars here, each one adding a new harmonic colour without ever cluttering the arrangement, is breathtaking.
Marr's guitar work throughout is simply beyond praise. "The Boy with the Thorn in His Side" features a chiming, arpeggiated riff that seems to contain an entire emotional universe in its four bars. "There Is a Light That Never Goes Out" — arguably the greatest pop song ever written — is driven by a synth-string arrangement and a guitar part so simple and so perfect that it seems to have existed before the song was written, waiting for someone to discover it. The jangle of his Rickenbacker on "Cemetry Gates" is the sound of sunlight filtered through stained glass.
Andy Rourke's bass playing is the secret engine of The Smiths. His melodic, fluid lines on "Bigmouth Strikes Again" provide the song's harmonic movement while Marr's guitar rakes across the top in sheets of distortion. Mike Joyce's drumming is similarly essential — propulsive but never mechanical, providing the rhythmic backbone that allows Marr's guitar parts to float free.
This is The Smiths at their absolute peak — a band in which every member is operating at the very limits of their ability and making it sound completely effortless.
