My Top 100, No. 71: "Will Do" by TV on the Radio

TV on the Radio is like a normal indie rock band, only really really spacy.

The key to the appeal of "Will Do" is in the first line. That melody, repeated throughout the song, is so catchy. I don't listen to this song on purpose very often, but like four or five times a week I find myself just absentmindedly singing, "It might be impractical to seek out a new romance" to nobody in particular.

And that's really it. That's how much I like that one line. It is, for whatever reason, incredibly catchy, (it helps that the lyrics sound conversational while at the same time fitting perfectly into the melody, as in "And So It Goes") and Tunde Adebimpe's vocals are some combination of swallowed and belted and processed that makes it a really fun line to sing.
It helps that this is song uses bass guitar as efficiently and effectively as any I can think of. "Will Do" is preposterously dense--there's a keyboard line or a noise effect at pretty much every beat of the song--but listen to the bass guitar in the verses. It's not performing the bass's normal function of driving the tempo or providing a countermelody. Instead, it's just accenting the most important syllables of the vocal line, which turns "It might be impractical to seek out a new romance" into "(beat) it might be impractical to SEEK out a NEW ro-MANCE." That busyness makes the complete lack of instrumentation in the first line of the second verse particularly impactful, and that in turn plays into the setting up and then confounding of expectations in the last line of that verse.
All of that only matters, though, if you get past the first line of the song.