Until recently it’d been quite a while since I sent out a dispatch on this channel. But we’re not here to talk about doubt and stagnation right now. We’re here to talk about New Order’s “Regret.”

Then again, you don’t need me to tell you how great “Regret” is. Lusciousness simply seeps from its pores, drips off of it. From its self-consciously overdramatic canned-strings-and-ascending-guitar opening, through the nuke-u-ler bass burst from which its nigh unvarying tambourine-funk dance beat mushrooms, to the sap-sweet coda incinerated in another such burst, it pulses and pushes your body to move, while a particularly affecting vocal performance form Barney Sumner, desolate and hopeful at the same time, dares your heart not to move.

The guitar is slippery and silver. The synths are a comforting, pillowy grey. The drums are mixed low but in the red. And the bass is deep blue-wounded and seeking, one of the best amongst Peter Hook’s classic lessons in how-you’re-not-supposed-to-play-bass-fiddle.

But I need to tell you how great “Regret” is. Sometimes it’s all I want to hear. And there I am listening to this one track on endless repeat, stopping eventually only because some rational part of me says that it’s not healthy to indulge this urge. (I’ll wear out the song. I’ll wear out my ears. Isn’t there that Badfinger best-of I still haven’t listened all the way through?) I couldn’t even tell you much about the rest of Republic, the oft-maligned mid-90s comeback album that it kicks off, since I so rarely get past “Regret” and the repeat button.

There’s something so rich about the sound of this song. “Layered”: that’s not really the word, because the elements are blended, mushed-together really, in a way that prevents a casual listening from easily yielding up its composite elements. The pleasure that keeps the song fresh the millionth consecutive time through lies in picking out how the insistent beat plays against the almost tentative, not-quite-behind singing or how the ending guitar variation, falling back down the scale where it before rushed ahead, wraps itself around the previously referenced low lonesome bass figure. You will hear something new this time. Maybe the tick-tack clatter from 0:27-0:40, when Hook backs off from the signature riff, will step forward. Maybe the tinkling keyboard, something like a toy harpsichord, will pop out during the second verse.

Actually, you need to know how great “Regret” is. It has lyrics roughly as inscrutable as any of Sumner’s texts, but it’s the yearning of his delivery that really puts across the, well, song part of the song, reinforcing the longing of the chorus while sabotaging its stabs at defiance. The singer’s telling us “there’s nothing I regret,” but he’s clearly lying. There’s a reason I habitually mishear the “look at me, I’m not you” that punctuates the second verse as that most trite pop sentiment, “I love you.” The sham of his tough face is entirely transparent. He’s ready to roll over. All that wanting, but instead “just wait till tomorrow/that’s what they all say,” leaving the speaker in a state of exquisite frustration that caps “Regret”’s hazy monologue on the complications that remain, even after “you are mine.”