Song on the Internet
Seventeen years of relentless searching by a community of amateur sleuths from all corners of the globe appears to have finally solved the mystery of “The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet.”. An anonymous enigma that haunted music forums and Reddit threads for years, the song has been identified as “Subways of Your Mind” by a little-known German band called FEX. The revelation marks the end of one of the most exhaustive and passionate hunts for lost media in recent internet history.
It was an original recording from the 1980s that became a defining piece of the so-called “lostwave” subculture-a niche dedicated to finding and preserving obscure, forgotten tracks from the pre-internet era. A journey to uncover its origins began in the early 2000s and reached its climax this week, when one Redditor made the breakthrough discovery.
The Genesis of a Mystery
Subways of Your Mind” begins in the 1980s with a German teenager taping the song off his local radio station, NDR. It was part of a mix tape that included popular bands such as XTC and The Cure. It was one of those moments captured on a cassette tape at a time when this medium was already overtaken by digital distribution. Darius S., the teenager, held onto the tape for years until 2007 when he decided to upload it to online music forums in hopes that someone might be able to identify the mystery track.
In no time, the song started receiving much attention from an emerging online audiophile and music enthusiast community. But despite repeated attempts through online databases and various music catalogs, it remained a mystery. The audiophiles listened intently to every detail-the accent of the lead singer, instruments used, even the faint background noise-but all efforts at tracing the song to its roots led nowhere.
The Birth of a Community
By the time the search well-retched into the next decade, the song had taken on a mythic status: it came to be called “The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet” and spurred along one of the largest, most enduring collective media hunts of its time. The charm of the song wasn’t just its melody but lay in the mystery surrounding it. The search, for many, became more about the chase itself than it was about the music: the sense of uncovering some long-lost piece of cultural history.
Fast-forward to 2019, and it had become a mystery that enthralled thousands of people around the world. TheMysteriousSong, a subreddit for crowdsourcing the identification of forgotten tracks, became the focal point for this investigation. From all corners of the world, people contributed to the search by posting ideas and tips, even theories on the origin of the song. One such Reddit user even managed to track it down to a radio contest called Hörfest, which was organized in the 1980s by a German public broadcaster and featured local amateur bands.
The Breakthrough: Finding FEX
Despite these efforts, the mystery remained unsolved until May 2023, when a breakthrough emerged from the mountains of archived material. Arne, moderator in the Reddit group called TheMysteriousSong, had chanced upon an obscure reference to Hörfest, some regional competition for amateur musicians in Hamburg. It seemed a thoroughly plausible explanation of how a track by a completely unknown artist might have surfaced on a station that seemed otherwise so professionally curated as NDR. Then, of course, came the good part: Arne’s finding was only the starting point, since it emerged that one band-FEX-might hold the secret to the whole puzzle.
As if out of a true-life coincidence, one of the bands named in the Hörfest archives was called FEX, a four-man band from Kiel, Germany. As Arne and other investigators perused more esoteric information about the band, they found a crucial clue-a nexus between FEX and the song in question. One Reddit user, marijn1412, was able to hunt down the old members of FEX and then contacted them, asking about the mysterious track.
The former band members, including 68-year-old musician Michael Haedrich, had no idea about the recent success of the track. According to Haedrich, the band had been “absolutely overwhelmed” by the discovery. “It’s amazing that someone was interested in music by a band that was only successful regionally, if at all,” he told German news outlet Der Spiegel. “That was over 40 years ago, and we never imagined this would happen.”
The Final Reveal
Haedrich and the band members could finally claim “Subways of Your Mind” as their song. This week, marijn1412 posted an update in which he said he’d contacted the band, who confirmed that this was indeed the origin of the track. They also shared a clearer version of the song, which had been floating around the internet in muffled quality for years.
Haedrich said FEX had originally formed in the early 1980s in Kiel and that their music style combined New Wave with elements of Post-Punk. “It was one of those times when we were just trying out everything-sounds, influences,” Haedrich recalls. “We were part of the happening music scene of Northern Germany, but we never expected anyone outside our circle to take much notice.”
Since then, the band has gone on to express interest in re-releasing “Subways of Your Mind”, even going so far as to possibly record a new version and film a music video to go along with the single release. The success of the song has regenerated interest in the band’s back catalog, with fans and collectors alike yearning to find any more lost nuggets from FEX.
The End of the Search—Or Just the Beginning?
For many members of the Reddit community, it’s the culmination of years of work. But one question can’t help but be asked: what now for the lostwave community, now that the greatest mystery has been cracked?
Josh Chapdelaine, a media studies professor at Queens College, places the Lostwave music phenomenon within a larger trend that characterizes the digital era. “Lostwave searches promote community collaboration and participation beyond what digital platforms allow,” Chapdelaine said. “They let people take part in investigations that anyone with a critical mind can push forward. And even when a mystery is solved, the community doesn’t disappear; it metamorphoses.”
But since it opened, the TheMysteriousSong subreddit has thrived as a destination for quests to recover lost media. Films and obscure songs and images have been found; most have taken on new life in digital repeats. The search for “Subways of Your Mind” might be over, but it helped foster an enduring culture of discovery.
For many of its community members, it is not the music that matters; it’s the journey-the experience itself: sharing lost history. For them, after following the clues for so many years, the real reward lay in the sharing of the search itself.
As Haedrich told Der Spiegel in an interview, “For us, it has just come suddenly. The song’s journey from being a forgotten memory to a cultural treasure is as unexpected as it is thrilling.”
In the end, “Subways of Your Mind” is not just a song but testimony to the power of community and that timeless human longing to reveal the past-mystery by mystery.
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