Most Mysterious Song on the Internet
A teenager in West Germany taped an unnamed new wave song from NDR radio sometime around 1984, then left it on a cassette marked with a question mark, where its driving synths and half-heard lyric, “like the wind,” sat unidentified for decades. After Darius and Lydia digitized the track in 2007, online sleuths followed dead ends through YouTube, Reddit, Discord, DJ playlists, and hundreds of obscure bands until a 2024 search through Hamburg’s Hörfest archives led user marijn1412 to FEX, a little-known Kiel band whose former member Michael Hädrich recognized the song as “Subways of Your Mind.”
Long before it had a name, the song existed as a fragment of private listening history. In the early to mid 1980s, a German teenager, usually identified publicly only as Darius S., recorded music from radio onto cassette in Wilhelmshaven. One of those recordings was a moody English-language new wave track with a driving beat, blurred lyrics, and no attached title or performer. Because the radio announcement was missing or not captured, the song became one more unidentified track among a personal archive of home-taped music. Its later fame would come not from a chart position or a label campaign, but from the simple modern problem of hearing a song and being unable to prove what it was.
The public search began in stages. Darius and his sister Lydia H., who used the online pseudonym Anton Riedel in early forum posts, tried to identify several unknown songs from the cassette collection. By March 2007, a short excerpt of the unidentified track was being posted to music identification forums and related websites. The song was often described by possible lyric fragments, especially Like the Wind, Blind the Wind, Check It In, Check It Out, or Take It In, Take It Out. It spread slowly through old web forums, file uploads, WatZatSong, YouTube, and later Reddit. The recording was widely believed to have come from NDR, probably from a youth or alternative music programme associated with the 1980s German radio landscape, but the exact airplay log could not be pinned down.
The case grew into a defining lostwave mystery in 2019, when new YouTube and Reddit attention turned a private identification problem into a mass investigation. Searchers examined accents, synthesizers, drum sounds, broadcast practices, possible radio playlists, German post-punk networks, performance rights databases, obscure records, and regional band archives. NDR presenter Paul Baskerville, long suspected as the DJ who may have played the song, became part of the public story, but the song was not found in his own records. Community members built spreadsheets and followed leads through amateur bands, German music contests, record collectors, radio archives, and small-scene memories. Many claims surfaced and failed. For years, the track remained both famous and anonymous, a song known to millions without the one fact that normally begins a music catalogue entry: artist and title.
The break came through archival research into Hörfest, an event connected to NDR and amateur bands. A Reddit investigator using the handle marijn1412 connected old regional music references to a band called FEX, from Kiel. FEX had been described in period material as playing rock with wave and pop influences, and one of the names connected to the band overlapped with other north German music-scene leads. When Michael Hädrich, a former FEX member, was contacted, he recognized the song as Subways of Your Mind, written by bandmate Ture Rückwardt. A recording supplied by the band matched the mysterious song closely enough that the search community treated the main question as solved. On 4 November 2024, the identification was announced publicly.
The resolution was unusually strong for an internet mystery but not perfect in every historical detail. NDR later reported that FEX had recorded the song in 1983 and that the band, including Hädrich, Rückwardt, Norbert Ziermann, and Hans-Reimer Sievers, reunited decades later after learning of the search. Official release pages later described a licensed release of the original demo material and connected the song to the band. In January 2025, NDR reported that an original-related cassette had been found among Hädrich's tapes, adding another layer of support. Yet the exact radio broadcast date, the exact programme path, and the original station master documentation remain less settled than the artist and title.
The case is best understood as a modern archival mystery rather than a supernatural one. It involved no crime, no hidden code, and no confirmed conspiracy. Its strangeness came from the gap between analog ephemerality and digital memory. A cassette recording from a local radio broadcast survived while the metadata around it vanished. The internet then amplified that absence into a global puzzle, one solved by a mixture of patient archival work, local music knowledge, crowdsourced spreadsheets, and the luck of reaching surviving musicians who still had tapes. The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet is now Subways of Your Mind by FEX, but its story remains a study in how easily small cultural artifacts can disappear, and how unexpectedly they can return.