"Most Mysterious Song on the Internet" Identified 17 Years Later

The band that recorded it had been oblivious to the online phenomenon

Photo: Bruno Guerrero

BY Megan LaPierrePublished Nov 8, 2024

Listening to a March 2020 episode of the Reply All podcast called "The Case of the Missing Hit" brought such a memorable burst of early-pandemic joy, and now it seems as though another similar mystery has been solved: after 17 years, the song that members of the r/TheMysteriousSong subreddit have scoured the internet to for information on has finally been identified.

It all started back in 2007 when a German brother and sister, Darius and Lydia, uploaded a digitized cassette radio recording from when they were teenagers in 1984. As reported by Rolling Stone in 2019, the other tracks on the tape were mainly from popular bands of the era like the Cure, XTC, Simple Minds and Flock of Seagulls (as well as a CanCon appearance from Corey Hart's "Sunglasses at Night") — but they had also recorded a few "unknown pleasures," one of which they still struggled to identify years later.

"All the years of passively searching for the lyrics on the internet hadn't brought any results, so I thought, it's time to become more active and reach out for a bigger audience," Lydia told the publication at the time of what happened in 2007, when she post a one-minute, 14-second snippet of the song online on a German website devoted to '80s synthpop, as well as Canadian site spiritoftheradio.ca, which acted as something of a crowdsourced Shazam at the time.

It was only in 2019 when Lydia decided to post it to Reddit that the search really go global, with tens of thousands of people joining the hunt to put a name to the new wave track. Still, everyone was grasping at straws trying to guess the locale of the singer's accent or what instruments were used in the recording — up until earlier this week, when u/marijin1412 said that they had come across a band that fit the bill while researching an event for up-and-coming acts that had been organized in Northern Germany by a public radio broadcaster in the early 1980s.

The Redditor ended up reaching out to all four members of FEX, a four-piece band from Kiel. One of them, keyboardist Michael Hädrich, sent them back a slightly different version of the mystery song, and revealed that it was titled "Subways of the Mind."

"After I emailed him back that the song is actually quite a famous 'lost song,' he asked me not to go public with it until he spoke with his old band members," u/marijin1412 wrote. In the meantime, though, the song did get registered at [the German performance rights organization] GEMA and people found out about it. But I'm happy to say that the band members agreed for me to go public with it."

In an interview with Spiegel, Hädrich revealed that he and his former bandmates were "absolutely overwhelmed" by — and had been totally unaware of — the niche phenomenon that trying to identify their song had become. "I thought it was amazing that someone was interested in music by a band that was only successful regionally, if at all, and that was over 40 years ago," the musician said. Yesterday (November 7), he reunited with bandmates Ture Rückwardt (lead vocals and guitar) and Norbert Ziermann (bass) to perform an acoustic rendition of "Subways of the Mind" for the German radio station NDR 1 Welle Nord — their first performance since dissolving the band in 1985.

Lydia revealed in a post on the subreddit that she had been connected with Hädrich, Rückwardt and Ziermann through a journalist last night and given the opportunity to ask them some questions. "They were so incredibly nice and still overwhelmed by the new situation and full of gratitude that we didn't give up and finally tracked them down, she wrote. "At the end of the phone call, they played the song again live acoustically, and I don't want to exaggerate, but I had a lump in my throat and tears in my eyes throughout."

Now all that's left for FEX is to re-record the song, upload it to streaming services, and let their virality continue! See Lydia's post below with the full tracklist from the mixtape, where you can also listen to "Subways of the Mind."

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