Cover of "The Most Mysterious Song" vinyl single release, February 2025
Live single cover
Cover of the 1985 live single,released 26 December 2024
"Subways of Your Mind" is a single by German new wave band Fex,recorded in 1984. In 1985,a demo cassette tape containing the song was released to promote the band's live tour across Northern and Central Germany,with the tape itself being primarily sold at the tour.[1] On 18 March 2007,a cassette tape recording from a radio broadcast in the mid-1980s was uploaded online and garnered significant attention. The song remained unidentified,even after being uploaded to the Internet,prompting a 17-year-long search to identify the artist and song title. During this search,the song earned the nickname "The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet".[note 2]
The song was recorded privately in Wilhelmshaven from a radio broadcast during the mid-1980s,possibly around 1984.[2] In 2019,it became the subject of a viral Internet phenomenon,with many users of sites such as Reddit and Discord collaborating to identify the song and recording artist.[2]
On 4 November 2024,the song was identified by Reddit user u/marijn1412 as "Subways of Your Mind" by Fex,a rock band from Kiel. Confirmation came with the release of a 1985 EP featuring a studio version of the song,as well as a recording of a live performance in the same year.[3][4][5] On 12 January 2025,the daughter of the band's keyboardist Michael Hädrich posted to the Reddit community formed around the song that her father had found a cassette copy of the studio version that had been played on German radio around 1984. The copy was released as a digital single the following day.[6] However,the ¼master tape containing this version has yet to be found.[7]
"Subways of Your Mind" is one of the most famous examples of lostwave,music of unknown origin.
Composition
In a 2024 interview,Fex's keyboardist,Michael Hädrich,gave an account of the song's inspiration and meaning:
Well, Ture, he's the composer, so he could answer this best but I know what his opinion is on this. It is the mixture of the "no future" atmosphere at that time – remember, it was the Cold War in the eighties, everyone thought eventually someone is going to hit the red button, so this was the atmosphere, and so the song had this "sun will never shine" parts in it – but also "the young and restless dreamers". So there are always positive lines in it that give a contrast to the melancholic part of the song. And I think this contrast, this mixture of positive and fear, makes the song so attractive, yes? Simplicity – somehow it has a simplistic charm to it, and it transports this atmosphere.
Three different recordings of this song are known to exist. The first recording of the song took place between 1983 and 1984, and is believed to feature Volker Schenk on bass. Volker himself claims that this recording was released as a single in 1983, but the truthfulness of this statement is unclear.[9] This is the version of the song that was aired on NDR. This recording has a shorter intro and a fade-out ending. The second time the song was recorded was at an unknown time in 1984, albeit definitely after the NDR version, at a studio in Heikendorf.[10] This recording is of noticeably worse sound quality, but it has a longer intro and proper ending. The bassist on this recording is Jörg Lemcke.[11] The third recording, which is featured on their 1985 demo tape, happened in November of 1984 at Hawkeye Studios. The longer intro and ending from the Heikendorf recording is kept, with a new keyboard part added that was not in either of the first two recordings. The bassist on this recording is Norbert Ziermann.[5] Additionally, the lyrics between all three recordings feature minor differences.
Radio broadcast
The track list of Darius' BASF 4|1 tape that includes "Like the wind" (mislabelled as "Blind the Wind"), and a question mark indicating that the artist was unknown
A German teenager named Darius S. (from Wilhelmshaven) recorded the song from a German public radio station program in the 1980s.[2][12] He recorded the song on a cassette tape and made a mixtape, which also included songs from XTC and the Cure. To get clean recordings of songs, Darius purposely removed dialogue from the radio hosts, which is likely why the exact airplay date and the title were unknown.[13]
Online search
In 2004, Darius' older sister, Lydia H., bought him a website domain as a birthday present, which he used to raise awareness of the unidentified songs in his collection. He then digitized his radio recordings, saving the songs as .aiff and .m4a files, and uploaded them to his site, named Unknown Pleasures after the 1979 album by English post-punk band Joy Division.[14]
On March 18, 2007, Lydia began her online search for the song on a Usenet group, but later migrated to websites with song identification tools. She posted a 1:15 excerpt of the song to best-of-80s.de (a German forum devoted to eighties synth-pop) and to The Spirit of Radio (a fan site dedicated to Canadian radio station CFNY-FM).[2][12] The song slowly spread across the Internet, being uploaded to WatZatSong in 2009 and to YouTube in 2011. Spanish indie record label Dead Wax Records posted the excerpt of the song to their YouTube channel in 2017. This caught the attention of Gabriel Pelenson, a friend of Dead Wax owner Nicolás Zúñiga, who began searching for the song's origin in 2019.
Pelenson uploaded the excerpt of the song to his YouTube channel and many music-related Reddit communities, and eventually founded r/TheMysteriousSong.[15] Searchers made contact with individuals potentially pertinent to the search, such as NDR disc jockeyPaul Baskerville, German performance rights organizationGEMA, and YouTube channel "80zforever", which posts obscure music.[2] Baskerville agreed to play the song on his then-current radio show Nachtclub on July 21, 2019.[16] Although no new leads came of it, it did make Lydia and Darius aware of the new wave of investigation, and Lydia subsequently became involved with the Reddit community in August.[16]
Theories
Searchers generally agreed that the singer had some sort of European accent, but the specific type was unclear at the time.[12] Some users had theorized that the Yamaha DX7 synthesizer, which was released in late 1983, was used in the leads.[16] This was later confirmed by Fex's keyboardist Michael Hädrich.[17]
There had been some speculation that the song was recorded in 1984, since most of the other songs on the cassette tape were released around that time. Further evidence for this is that the Technicstape deck which Darius S. likely used to record the song was manufactured that year.[2]
NDR Radio disc jockey Paul Baskerville, who was approached in 2019 but does not remember playing the song,[12] suspected that it was a demo recording that was played once by a radio presenter and then thrown away.[18]
One article from March 2021 claimed that the song was likely written and performed by Viennese singer Christian Brandl and drummer Ronnie Urini in 1983, with both German and English versions. The song would have been recorded in the studio of the late Fred Jakesch on Mariahilferstraße in Vienna. Alto saxophonist Heinz Hochrainer said he was present for a planned saxophone element, but that was never recorded. A preliminary mix of the song then would have made its way to a radio station in 1984. Urini corroborated the story and also provided an old typewritten version of the German lyrics as evidence. However, Robert Wolf, Brandl's musical colleague and the frontman of their band Chuzpe, invalidated the argument, saying that he did not recognize Brandl's voice in the song and that the drums sounded more like an electronic drum machine than Urini.[19] Following the discovery of the song's name and band, Urini claimed to the press that the recordings that had surfaced were forged by AI, and that he does not want to do anything more about the search.[20]
Viral internet phenomenon
On May 27, 2019, Australian music news website Tone Deaf wrote the earliest article focusing on the song, with author Tyler Jenke discussing the preliminary stages of the search for the track and noting that the search was similar to a 2013 search for a song which was ultimately identified as "On the Roof" by Swedish musician Johan Lindell.[21]
Between 2019 and 2021, American YouTuber Justin Whang posted five episodes of his series Tales from the Internet discussing the song and the progress of the search. His videos further galvanized Internet users to contribute to the effort to identify the song.[12][15]
In addition, a number of covers and remixed versions of the song have been created,[14] including a cover by American band Mephisto Walz titled "Like the Wind" and released on their 2020 album All These Winding Roads.[22]
In March 2023, the song was used in MyHouse.wad, a Doom II mod posted to the Doomworld forums by the pseudonymous user "Veddge". As described in PC Gamer, "you can find it playing from the open door of a lonely car, several layers deep into the inception-style madness that plagues the mod". The song's cryptic nature led it to be widely associated with the "liminal space" internet aesthetic.[23]
Identification
On November 4, 2024, Reddit user u/marijn1412 claimed to have identified the song as "Subways of Your Mind" by the German band Fex. While researching bands who participated in Hörfest, an annual event highlighting lesser-known musical artists, the user contacted a Fex band member listed in an issue of the German newspaper Nordwest-Zeitung[de]. According to the user, the band member confirmed that Fex was the creator of the song and planned to re-release it as a result of it being unearthed.[24][25] One member of Fex, Michael Hädrich, confirmed the story to German tabloid Tz,[26][27] while the band's lead singer, Ture Rückwardt, participated in an interview with the Kiel newspaper Kieler Nachrichten, further corroborating the story.[28] On November 7, 2024, three of the four original members of the band, Hädrich, Rückwardt and bassist Norbert Ziermann, performed an acoustic version of the song for the German radio station NDR 1 Welle Nord in Kiel.[29] The identification of the song occurred forty years after the recording date of the demo, seventeen years after the first known online attempt to identify it, and five years after the general Internet became aware of the search.
↑ 1985 (original demo release) 20 December 2024 (official demo rerelease) 26 December 2024 (official 1985 live performance release) 13 January 2025 (NDR radio version digital release) 13 March 2025 (NDR radio version physical release)
↑ Also known as "Like the Wind", "The Sun Will Never Shine", "Blind the Wind", "Check It In, Check It Out", "Take It In, Take It Out", and "Summer Blues" after lines in fan-interpreted lyrics. "Subways of Your Mind" was also correctly speculated to be the name. Sometimes referred to as "The Mysterious Song". Often acronymed as LTW, TMMS, TMS and TMMSOTI.
↑ While Norbert plays on the 1985 demo version, it's believed that Volker Schenk was the bassist on the demo version that aired on NDR. Additionally, Jörg Lemcke has provided his own practice room rehearsal tape in past, although he is not believed to be featured in any official releases of the song.
1 2 3 4 5 6 Böhm, Markus; Kleinz, Torsten (5 November 2024). "Netzrätsel nach Jahren gelöst: Hinter dem »geheimnisvollsten Lied des Internets«steckt eine deutsche Band"[Internet mystery solved after years: A German band was behind the 'most mysterious song on the Internet'.]. Der Spiegel (in German). Retrieved 6 November 2024. Es ist ein historischer Tag. Nicht etwa wegen der US-Wahl. Sondern, weil etwas anderes geschehen ist, das sich für einige Menschen offenbar ähnlich weltbewegend anfühlt: Das Geheimnis um den »most mysterious Song on the Internet«, und damit eines der bekanntesten Netzrätsel überhaupt, ist gelüftet worden. Nach 17 Jahren. [It's a historic day. Not because of the US election. But because something else happened that apparently felt equally earth-shattering to some people: The secret of the 'most mysterious song on the Internet', and thus one of the most famous online mysteries of all time, has been revealed. After 17 years.]
↑ Hädrich, Michael (12 November 2024). "1. This will be sort…". r/TheMysteriousSong. Retrieved 14 November 2024.
↑ Hädrich, Michael (11 November 2024). "FEX Interview With Michael Hädrich". After Hours Café (Interview). Interviewed by Pete Casiello. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: WRDV.
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