A perfect throwback to the music I loved growing up.

It’s my favorite song of this dark, sinister year known as 2020…and judging from charts around the world, I’m not alone. Released in November of 2019, Canadian hitmaker The Weeknd‘s “Blinding Lights” gradually made its way up numerous charts in fits and starts, sometimes dropping a few places before soldiering upward, eventually reaching No. 1—literally everywhere.

Like the year in which it topped the charts, the slickly sinister “Blinding Lights”—the second single from Weeknd’s fourth studio album, 2020’s After Hours—is one of those rare moments where all previous commercial song-construction R&D has come together to deliver precisely what sounds pleasing to the human ear, coupled with lyrics universally crafted to appeal to anyone, even in highly politicized times: “I’m blinded by the lights / I can’t sleep until I feel your touch,” and “I’m drowning in the night / when I’m like this, you’re the one I trust.”

By coupling lyrics about rekindling old flames and finding love-thought-lost with shimmering electronic synths conjuring up those romantic, neon ’80s memories—memories woven deeply into the hearts of us that lived through that decades-ago era, and that youngsters who can dream see through the purple-tinged approximations of “80s life” scattered across the web and Instagram like a perfect, plastic paradise on a completely different Earth—you get the perfect music potion. Kudos to the songwriters of “Blinding Lights,” which was largely written by The Weekend himself (real name Abel Tesfaye) and (not surprisingly) Max Martin, master of the the hit single.

I grew up a New Wave kid in the 1980s; my favorite bands were Duran Duran, Depeche Mode, Alphaville—Euro imports who let the synthesizer lead the way over more traditional rock’s guitar; bands that never left the dancefloor too far behind when crafting an album. The Weeknd is one of those artists with an affinity for that ’80s-defining sound—a time that predates The Weeknd (Tesfaye was born in 1990). I’d guess that maybe every third single The Weeknd releases makes me take notice as he dabbles in those vintage vibes. Previous singles like “Can’t Feel My Face,” “In the Night,” “I Feel It Coming,” “Lost in the Fire,” and subsequent single “In Your Eyes” are all add-to-playlist songs for me, bringing back a bygone time.

But is ’80s New Wave, and more specifically the “synth-pop” subgenre, still a viable, broad commercial format? If you go by the charts for “Blinding Lights,” it would appear so, at least in this case.

It’s surreal looking at the line on Wikipedia that shows its chart placings: a clean sweep of No. 1s across the world, showing all the areas it topped the charts (34 countries!), making it Weeknd’s highest-placing track to date. And to that I say: Hey Weeknd, keep making New Wave music!