Music
Top 7 The Smiths Songs
The Smiths made music that could be beautiful, bitter, funny and devastating, sometimes within the same song. This ranking explores seven tracks that reveal the band’s contradictions: Johnny Marr’s extraordinary melodic invention, Morrissey’s romantic fatalism and black humour, and the strange alchemy that made their songs feel intensely personal. From the rush of This Charming Man to the pitch-black comedy of Girlfriend in a Coma, these are seven different arguments for why The Smiths still matter. Would you rank them differently?
The Smiths at their most immediately exhilarating. Johnny Marr’s interlocking guitar parts make the song feel as if it is constantly taking flight, while Morrissey’s oblique storytelling leaves just enough unsaid. Intelligent, strange and impossibly catchy, it is the perfect opening statement.
Romance pushed to its most dramatic extreme. The narrator’s longing to escape ordinary life becomes a fantasy of total surrender, with the luminous arrangement making fatalism feel almost euphoric. Few songs make vulnerability sound so grand.
A different kind of Smiths masterpiece: tremolo guitar, restless rhythm and social alienation. Rather than making loneliness sound delicate, the track turns it into something physical and monumental. Its opening seconds are practically an identity of their own.
The emotional low point of the ranking, and possibly its most devastating performance. The arrangement gives Morrissey room to move from self-loathing to bitter observation to almost unbearable pleading. It is the feeling of being trapped inside your own thoughts.
A furious account of institutional cruelty, driven by one of Marr’s most propulsive guitar arrangements. The music is bright and mobile; the subject is anything but. It turns a specific grievance into a song that still feels combustible.
A miniature masterpiece built around the simplest of wishes. Its brevity is part of its force: there is no grand resolution, only the quiet hope that life might finally offer something different. The restraint makes the longing hit harder.
A jaunty melody carries one of the band’s darkest comic premises. The horror lies in the contrast: the music is breezy, the delivery is deadpan, and the listener is left wondering exactly how seriously to take the narrator. The Smiths could make discomfort sound like a perfect pop song.
Would you rank this the same?
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