As he often does, the vocalist Tyler Joseph swerves between singing and rap-like spoken word, but here he pitches his voice into something especially fragile, hoarse, and tentative. In the first verse, he says that we “glorify” people “when they”—and he leaves the sentence unfinished. When they what? But what he’s referring to quickly becomes clear. “My opinion: Our culture can treat a loss like it’s a win,” he sings. This cultural tendency communicates that “an earlier grave is an optional way.” He ends that thought, and the verse, on one lonely syllable: “No.”

He gets more strident as the song continues, mentioning “streams,” “extra conversation,” and “celebration” as a reward if he “gives up” and chooses to “go out with a bang.” A number of recent high-profile deaths—suicides, overdoses, and even murder—that sent the deceased’s work up the Billboard charts thus come to mind. “They say, ‘How could he go if he’s got everything?’” he sings, seeming to reference the common cognitive dissonance around celebrity tragedy. “I’ll mourn for a kid, but won’t cry for a king.”

Chillingly, Joseph’s remarks about society link up with statements about himself: In the swellingly emotional bridge, he asks for promises that “If I lose to myself / You won’t mourn a day and you’ll move on to someone else.” It’s a hard line he’s drawing, but not one without caveats. “I’m not disrespecting what was left behind / Just pleading that ‘it’ does not get glorified,” he sings. Lest he be seen as “disrespecting” the dead, he says that his problem is “with the people we praise who may have assisted.”

But it’s hard not to come away wondering if the dead have, in fact, been criticized. The song closes with a verse that’s part gut-punch and part PSA—the rhyme scheme is almost Dr. Seuss-ian—in which Joseph acknowledges that it’s good that the stigma around discussing mental health has been lessening. “But for sake of discussion … could it be true that some could be tempted to use this mistake as a form of aggression? … Thinking ‘I’ll teach them’? Well, I refuse the lesson.”

The question that arises: What might that refusal look like? No public funeral, no sharing of memories and songs in the case of untimely demise? Joseph doesn’t single out the specific ways in which the misuse of tragedy works (see, for example, how members of the public have heaped blame on the grieving loved ones of Mac Miller and Anthony Bourdain). He instead simply asks that “you won’t mourn a day.” But the loss of someone who’s touched millions of lives with their art is going to trigger a mass response inevitably, whether the cause of death is natural or not. Would denying fans the right to remember be cruel? The only alternative path of action Joseph suggests is to pay one’s respects to “grandparents or someone of age” for being “dedicated” to life.