The best track of 2014: Seasons (Waiting on You) by…

The best track of 2014: Seasons (Waiting on You) by Future Islands

Future Islands Perform At Shepherds Bush Empire In London — Samuel T Herring ... the man behind 2014’s most wonderful track. Photograph: Ollie Millington/Redferns via Getty Images

For many people, judging Seasons (Waiting on You) by Future Islands as a song in its own right will be tricky. They’ll have likely first come across it via the Baltimore band’s Letterman performance back in March, one of the year’s most memorable pop culture moments. In that clip, Samuel T Herring takes on multiple pop personas simultaneously: he swivels his hips like Elvis; he thumps his chest like Springsteen; he shimmies across the floor like a Northern Soul devotee and, during one genuinely confounding moment, unleashes a spine-chilling death-metal roar. It’s so deeply strange and mesmerising that it’s hard to forget. And therefore hard to untangle from the song itself. Are we praising a track here or just a viral meme of a man getting groovy?

Anyone who’s lived with the track throughout the year will know it’s the former, but why? What is it that made a synthy song from a four-piece indie band connect with people so deeply in 2014? After all, it doesn’t say anything sonically about the year in pop – synthy indie bands have been around since synths and indie – and it’s not particularly lyrically prescient. In fact, Seasons (Waiting on You) has a theme that is most remarkable for its simplicity: it’s about when we should cut our losses in a relationship that’s not working out. It wrestles with change: is it something we can expect of others? Is it possible for any of us to really change?

It’s not this message, though, but the delivery of it that transforms Seasons (Waiting on You) into a great pop song. Beyond the obvious trappings – the four-piece set up, say, or the plinky synth lines that inconspicuously open proceedings – this doesn’t actually sound like the work of an indie band at all, but rather that of seasoned soul musicians. Over a strident, simple bass pattern, Herring’s voice pulls and strains and wavers at all the crucial moments, from emotive peaks to deep baritone lows, flecked with grit and gravel. His sheer unfashionable sincerity, as he conveys feelings of hope and disenchantment that rise and fall with the undulating wash of synthesiser, is notable for how much it stands out from current pop trends.

Compare it to previous winners of the Guardian favourite track of the year: the precise robo-funk of Get Lucky in 2013; the pop sugar rush of Call Me Maybe in 2012; the widescreen weirdness of Lana Del Rey’s Video Games in 2011. Without doing down those songs’ obvious charms (or at least, any more than I already have), they all placed a certain amount of distance between the listener and the vocalist. All had a protective layer of sheen.

Future Islands benefit from no such luxury. Herring didn’t just look like a man prepared to lay everything out on the line and let you pick him apart, he sounds like one too. And the more you listen, the more you realise that everything great about the Letterman performance – the wide-eyed passion, the odd but irresistible invitation to get up and dance – comes from the song itself. This isn’t about a man doing an entertaining dance – that was merely a shortcut to the heart of the year’s most wonderful record.