One of the oldest mysteries on the internet has been solved. For almost two decades a moody song recorded off the radio in Germany has bedeviled online sleuths. Dubbed “The Most Mysterious Song On the Internet” by those who sought to find it, the song has finally been discovered.
It’s been an incredible year for solving long-running internet mysteries. In May, investigators tracked down “The Backrooms” and in September investigators identified “Celebrity Number Six.” Now it seems that The Mysterious Song has been discovered. It’s called “Subways Of the Mind” by the band FEX.
The story of The Most Mysterious Song On the Internet begins in the 1980s. Sometime around 1984, people in Germany recorded a song off of a radio station. Though unconfirmed, it’s generally accepted that NDR1 was the radio station and the program was Musik Für Junge Leute or “Music for Young People.”
This was that original clip:
The sister of the person who recorded the cassette—Lydia or bluuely on Reddit—uploaded a digital copy of the song to several forums in 2007. She wanted to know anything she could about the song. It didn’t get much attention. Over the years various people would stumble onto the mystery and attempt to help, but there wasn’t much movement.
Then, in 2019, Reddit got involved. A user called gabgaskins posted the song in 44 different music subreddits and r/TheMysteriousSong was founded. Later that year the song caught the attention of YouTuber Just Whang, who made a video about it. This supercharged the search.
As the years went on, the investigators tried many different tactics for tracking down the song. They tracked down the former host of Musik Für Junge Leute but he couldn’t help. Even Rolling Stone wrote about the hunt. Investigators set up a Discord server, ran analysis on different versions of the song from different sources, and cataloged dozens of leads. There’s been hoaxes, false positives, and hundreds of dead leads.
For the past few months the investigation into the song had focused on Hörfest, an annual showcase of local musicians sponsored by a public broadcaster in Hamburg. The community compiled a list of hundreds of bands from the era that could have possibly played at the festival and began to go through them.
At the beginning of October the TMS subreddit announced Weekend HörQuest #1. “Good chance [the Mysterious Band] is one of the hundreds of bands in the Hörfest list. But who wants to sit by themselves going through hundreds of band-names, right?” The post said. “This weekend kicks off HörQuest #1—the first drop of 20 bands from the Hörfest archives, for us all to do a deep dive on together.”
One of the investigators was the Redditor marijn1412, who ultimately cracked the case. According to marijn1412, they came across an old newspaper article in the Nordwest Zeitung—a regional newspaper in Germany—about two weeks ago. “The article was about a band called FEX from Kiel, who won a talent contest in Bremen in [September] 1984 and their music was described as Rock with Wave and Pop influences,” marijn1412 in a post on the /r/TMS subreddit.
marijn1412 said they recognized one of the names, Michael Hädrich, in the Nordwest Zeitung as a member of a band at Hörfest 83 called Phret. “I managed to get in touch with him and asked him if he still had some old material from those bands. He then sent me some of the songs he made with FEX and Phret... and lo and behold, one of them was titled Subways Of Your Mind,” marijn1412 said on Reddit.
Subways Of Your Mind is The Mysterious Song. A full, cleaner version of the song has finally been uploaded to Vocaroo.
When marijn1412 recognized the song, he reached back out to Hädrich to explain the situation. Hädrich had no idea their song was famous on the internet for being a piece of lost media. He told marijn1412 to keep everything under wraps while they contacted the other members of the band. The song was registered in the GEMA, a German organization for musicians, and Hädrich gave marijn1412 the go-ahead to go public.
It seems as if the mystery is solved, but the community is still double checking marjin1412’s work. The Mysterious Song Discord server is in read-only mode while the mods wait for more information. One of the top threads on the subreddit right now is dedicated to audio analysis of the tracks marjin1412 posted from Hädrich.
“As to whether or not it's a hoax, personally, I would completely rule out AI. The only potential for hoax that I would see is that it was recorded in the present day, dubbed onto a degrading tape (or redubbed multiple times), and then digitized from that tape,” user yopoyo said in a comment on that thread. “But given the other evidence from the time (including proof of members competing in talent contests in Northern Germany in that '83-85 time period, also seemingly including this one on Discogs), this is exactly the story I always imagined for TMS.”
According to marijn1412, FEX is planning a reunion. Almost 40 years after the original recording, and close to 20 after it became an internet mystery, they’re getting the band back together to play the old hits.
