You can’t talk about Singles without talking about Letterman. Really, at this point, it seems you can’t talk about Future islands at all without talking about Letterman. Ten years later, the performance still factors into so many narratives of the band, the breakthrough moment against which everything since has been compared. On March 3, 2014, Future Islands made their network TV debut, performing their single “Seasons (Waiting On You)” on The Late Show. After that, everything changed.
Maybe some Future Islands fans already expected a long-deserved ascension once the Baltimore trio had signed to the venerated label 4AD and returned with a gleaming earworm single in early 2014. But the Letterman performance was one of those bizarre, truly rare occasions where you witnessed, in real time, not only a performance that was obviously and instantly iconic, but a performance delivered by an underdog artist previously unknown to the vast majority of people who witnessed it.
Consider the implausibility one more time: a sometimes quirky but always deeply emotive synth-pop band, fronted by a man who neared 30 but looked 40 — his stocky frame cloaked in high-waisted pants and a simple t-shirt, his receding hair swept to the side — and who channeled the ecstasy of performance into idiosyncratic dance moves and a tendency to throw his voice into guttural growls over music far gentler and cleaner than such vocals would usually accompany. This was happening in DIY clubs across the country for years, as Future Islands racked up hundreds and hundreds of performances across the tour cycles for their first three albums. Then, suddenly but also after grinding countless miles, this was happening on national television. Letterman himself was bowled over by what he had just witnessed, giddily approaching the band afterwards and proclaiming: “I’ll take all of that you got!” This turned out to be a sentiment shared by many in 2014.
Future Islands’ performance went viral, quickly becoming the most watched video on Letterman’s YouTube. Memes of frontman Samuel T. Herring’s dance moves proliferated. Just a week before that year’s SXSW, the fires were stoked, and the band took the festival by storm — not a veteran act but far from a novice one, nevertheless the group to emerge as the hyped breakout of that year’s festival as if they were the hottest new thing. By the time Future Islands’ new album actually dropped at the end of March — 10 years ago this Sunday — there was a full-blown buzz around them. This would be their year.
It was a feel-good story, a band that was easy to root for finally getting their due. Future Islands had already been slugging it out for a long time. In the early ‘00s, the core trio of Herring, William Cashion, and Gerrit Welmers came together to form Art Lord & The Self Portraits. Still based in their native North Carolina, the three of them embarked on an arcane conceptual project; Herring played a character, and the general ethos was that of an overblown performance art piece. As lineups shifted and contracted, Cashion and Welmers had also grown tired of the artifice. They wanted to be taken more seriously as a band. So Herring, Cashion, and Welmers continued on as a new group, Future Islands.
Through the late ‘00s, they churned out synth-pop music with their own spin — first fizzy and energetic, then at times spacious but occasionally punctuated by Herring’s unexpected metal intonations. They toured relentlessly, logging around 150 shows a year. The people who found them then were already in love with the band’s open-hearted earnestness, or with their cathartic live shows. All of that core DNA was in place before Singles, but Singles was the album where Future Islands catalyzed it.
In 2013, the band finally had a break from the road. Having felt rushed by their previous label when making 2011’s On The Water, they rented a cabin in rural North Carolina and spent months working on new material. While the band didn’t set out to change their approach or specifically write a collection of bangers, they knew they were on to something. When Welmers and Cashion brought Herring the music for what would become “Seasons,” he finished the song in 30 minutes. “Any songwriter will tell you some of the best songs are ’30-minute’ songs… because it’s almost like you’re channeling from somewhere else or they’re meant to be there,” Herring told Stereogum recently when reflecting on “Seasons.” Back then, he excitedly told Cashion and Welmers it was their finest work; he said it again when they completed closer “A Dream Of You And Me.” After demoing more than 20 tracks, the band culled it down to 13, and then decided on a lean, mean, 10-track album.
After completing On The Water at a friend’s house, Future Islands booked some proper studio time with producer Chris Coady for Singles. The result was a collection that both amplified and streamlined what the band had already perfected in their sound. Singles was full of precision-targeted, infectious songs, relentless earworms from “Seasons” on to “Spirit” and “Sun In The Morning” and “Doves.” The band’s unique contrast — the haggard grain and full-throated swells of Herring’s performance against pristine synth arrangements — was heightened in the sparkling clear aesthetic of Singles. And while the band’s penchant for reflective material remained intact — especially on the centerpiece highlights “Back In The Tall Grass” and “A Song For Our Grandfathers” — there was also a tonal expansion on Singles. Prior albums had mostly grappled with breakups and making sense of the past. That was still there on Singles, but as Herring barreled towards 30, you could also see a spectrum of love, change, wonder. There was an emotional purge happening across these songs, but there was also a visceral joy, a sense of being present that carried forward into the whirlwind that kicked off once people heard this material.
Future Islands were used to people not paying attention. Though they’d accrued their cult following, they had been frustrated that previous albums hadn’t caught on as widely as they might’ve hoped or expected. You could interpret the title Singles a few ways then: an affable and chill trio making a rare statement of bravado, or a philosophical statement on making “pop” music that was not mainstream, or a sly wink. Herring had once considered calling the album Once More For Luck. Ultimately Singles was almost pre-ordained. Here was one of those albums that, to invoke the cliché, felt like an imagined greatest hits. It built on what the band had created before, but made it more muscular, ready for bigger rooms. It worked.
After Letterman and SXSW and the acclaim surrounding Singles, Future Islands had a 2014 defined by runaway success, but not without double-edged swords. By the time I spoke to the trio in the waning days of 2014, you got the sense that they were still sorting through their feelings on the Letterman performance — how it had become fodder for internet debate, or jokes, or how memes isolating Herring’s dance moves missed the point of the whole thing and sidelined his bandmates.
Whenever Herring’s been asked about the performance over the years — which still happens constantly— he regularly recalls not really remembering it, that he was lost in his mind during it. Similarly, the band spent the year hammering away on the road and had little sense of where Letterman and Singles had gotten them aside from noting bigger crowds and fancier venues. In that 2014 conversation, they were reticent to rest on laurels, spend too much time talking over achievements. They attributed it to the way they’d always worked: keep going forward, keep moving. But in hindsight, I wonder whether they already had a sense that years of hard work sparked by a singular moment would also become something of an albatross.
Following the feverish pitch of 2014 would indeed prove difficult. After another round of heavy touring, the band returned with The Far Field, a 2017 album that was slightly more muted. Again and again things are — inevitably, understandably, but not always fairly — compared back to “Seasons” and Singles. And, on some level, there is undeniably a sense of diminishing returns over time. Future Islands are more about refinement than evolution. Now, with the recent release of People Who Aren’t There Anymore, they have released three albums since Singles, and you pretty much know what you’re getting with each new installment. For devoted fans, that probably works just fine. For more casual spectators, it may seem as if the timbre of 2014 has long since faded, and memories of that time become illegible.
It was a true lightning-in-a-bottle moment. Future Islands experienced one of the stranger indie success stories of our time, and of course that couldn’t be replicated, or followed in any logical way. They are a big band now, but their story may forever be tinged by this moment, this flashpoint, that was always destined to be so much louder than anything else in this band’s life. At the time, they had set the stage. They were ready to harness it. And when it was happening, it was a beautiful thing to watch.
