The cello comes first, because it is the song's great stroke. Rock has employed strings for fifty years, usually as upholstery, a sugary swell dropped in late to make the chorus look expensive. Here the cello is a living presence with a pulse. It breathes, grain and rosin audible, and gives the song a human weight that no sample library could fake. Against it sit atmospheric guitars that shimmer and ache in the manner of classic rock's more contemplative moments, the sort of playing that has learned from Floyd's long horizons and from the warm amber glow of the great seventies ballad-makers without photocopying either. The electric guitars are warm rather than showy. Nobody is auditioning here, and the song is better for it.

Then there is the voice. Luke sings in a warm, powerful register that never tips into the throat-shredding histrionics of lesser anthem merchants. He has the good sense to let the melody do the heavy lifting, and he phrases like a man who means every syllable. The vulnerability is the point, and it carries the performance. When the track builds toward its anthemic peak, the lift feels earned, a door opening on weather rather than a stadium lighting rig being switched on.

The lyric is the other quiet triumph. The conceit is old, the turning year as a map of the heart, but Luke handles it with a lightness that keeps the cliché at bay. His snow is the emotional cold we all eventually cross, and the question he poses, "how to be in the snow / unless you are in the know", has a wry, folk-tinged knottiness that sticks in the head. It is an odd couplet that lands better in the ear than it reads on the page, which is a mark of a writer who understands that songs are sung, not framed. Beneath it runs a gentle moral argument, that the costs of loving and losing are the price of being anyone at all. Luke makes that case without a trace of self-pity, and it moves the listener.

The production deserves a special word of praise. At a time when so much guitar music is nudged onto a grid and polished until the fingerprints vanish, "Seasons" sounds like people in a room. The arrangement is allowed to swell, hesitate and settle, and the human imperfection that survives is the whole charm. The word symphonic is attached to this track in the publicity, and for once it is not hyperbole. The cello supplies the cinematic sweep, and the guitars keep it grounded in the pub-and-church-hall tradition from which the best English rock ballads have always sprung.

Independent artists are too often praised for effort when the praise should be for achievement. Luke needs no such allowance. "Seasons (to be human)" is a confident, beautifully balanced piece of songwriting that sets out to comfort the listener and does. It is a gift to anyone who has sat through a long winter of the soul and wondered whether spring was coming.