A mysterious mystery, no longer mysterious

Here's some good and fun news on a day when we could use it. One of the greatest internet mysteries of the past decade has been solved.

Maybe you've heard it on a podcast, or possibly read about it in a news story from Buzzfeed or NPR. But since 2019, a group of detectives have been trying to track down The most mysterious song on the internet, sometimes shortened to The Mysterious Song or TMS.

The song itself is really good if you ask me — it has a goth/post-punk vibe but a strong and catchy hook in the verse. The singer has that doom and gloom gothic voice that might remind you of other post-punk singers like Ian Curtis, Andrew Eldritch, or Rodney Orpheus. The guitars, likewise, do similar things to Joy Division or Echo and The Bunnymen, but there's a Yamaha DX7 adding some additional textures that bring a 1987-88 vibe to what feels otherwise firmly early-80s.

The saga actually begins much further back, when a German kid recorded the song off the radio in (probably) 1984 but never heard the DJ say what it was. His sister started looking for it online as far back as 2007. Here's a good rundown from a subreddit dedicated to the search, including links to deeper explainers and even redditors obsessing over DX7 patches.

The story continues with a lot of rabbit trails, false starts, and even some obscure Greek post-punk musicians claiming the song and uploading the crappy radio recording to Spotify as their own (sad, really; Statues in Motion turned out to be a good band that a lot of folks in the search enjoyed listening to, but their efforts to co-opt the song kind of taint them). But 3 days ago, a user made a post confirming that the creator of the tune, a German group called FEX, was found. To prove its validity, he added a different recording of it to his post. Turns out, the radio version was just a demo, which is why the German radio station didn't retain the tape — it was their policy to toss demos after playing them.

So now we know: the song is called "Subways of Your Mind" by FEX from Kiel, (West) Germany. We have multiple songs from them and at least one of those is also pretty great. They plan to get back together to make a modern re-recording of the tune.

And that's it. On one hand, I can't help but feel a little sadness at one less mystery in the world (the imagination can always create something cooler than reality, of course). But on the other, these guys who had no idea what was going on for the past 5 years are now going to get their due. And there are more lost tunes to find, even if they're not all as famous as this one.