If you lived through the eighties and you’re passionate about that period’s music, you will love this case of online music lore. The most mysterious song on the Internet has kept people investigating its attribution for more than 40 years. It has finally been solved, but not with the help of AI or music databases like Shazam. This is a case where an OSINT investigation cracked the case.
The most mysterious song on the Internet
This case revolves around an unknown, synth-driven new wave/post-punk track from the 1980s.
The story starts with a German teenager named Darius S., who was an avid music fan and used to record songs off the radio onto cassette tapes in the 1980s. One day, he recorded a song from NDR (Norddeutscher Rundfunk), a public German radio station, possibly on a program called “Musik für junge Leute” (“Music for young people.”)
The track was captured sometime in 1984, or possibly earlier, based on the cassette labeling and the radio DJ’s playlist at the time. The cassette tape that held this mystery song was labelled simply with generic track names or numbers, with no artist or title given for this one. Darius had many of these tapes stored away until decades later, when the search began.
How the investigation started
In 2007, Darius’s sister Lydia uploaded a portion of the song to the WatZatSong website (a music identification forum), hoping someone might recognize it. The mystery went viral in 2019 when a Chilean teenager and music enthusiast named Gabriel da Silva Vieira (aka @gabrielhell on Reddit) took an interest in the case.
He posted it on r/tipofmytongue and r/TheMysteriousSong, leading to a surge in collaborative investigation.
The clues
Nobody could trace the song’s origin. Some of the clues that people have worked on over time are:
- Recording Equipment: the cassette recordings were made using a Technics tape deck, suggesting high-quality home taping.
- NDR Archives: attempts to contact and research NDR’s archives have yielded little, though playlists from some radio shows of the time are being reviewed.
- Shazam and Audio Recognition: the song does not match anything in known audio databases like Shazam, Discogs, or MusicBrainz.
- Lyrics: at the time, only a partial transcription was available, and people assumed that its title was “Like the Wind” as it appeared in every refrain.
What kept the mystery going
"It’s not just about the song anymore, it’s about the story and the people it brought together."
Besides the fact that there was no match in commercial databases such as Spotify, Apple Music, Dioscogs, etc, no metadata was ever available. Even high-quality versions from cassette had no identifiable markers. Furthermore, despite the success and the interest sparked online, no band or producer came forward.
Thousands of man-hours were spent by Internet sleuths combing through German radio archives, contacting DJs, and comparing obscure vinyls. The song remained a mystery until 2024.
"Even one obscure 7-inch from the '80s leaves a trace — this one leaves almost nothing. That makes it all the more compelling."
Solving the mystery
“The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet” was positively identified in 2024 as “Subways of Your Mind” by the German post‑punk/new wave band FEX. You can listen to it in the video below.
The breakthrough came in November 2024, when Reddit user u/marijn1412 (a member of r/TheMysteriousSong) located an old newspaper article in the Nordwest Zeitung describing a band called FEX, active in the mid‑80s. Marijn1412 contacted a former member of FEX and received demos from the band, including one titled “Subways of Your Mind” that matched the mystery recording.
The band members later confirmed the song’s identity. Keyboardist/vocalist Michael Hädrich confirmed to media outlets that FEX were indeed the creators, and the original tape recorded off NDR was discovered in Hädrich’s archive in early 2025 and digitized for public release.
In January 2025, Michael Hädrich and his daughter found the exact NDR broadcast version tape—the same that Darius had recorded—with only a tiny difference (two drum beats at the beginning) due to the original recording process. That version was publicly released as the original version of the song.
How OSINT helped crack the case
The discovery was not a fluke — it was a direct result of OSINT-style techniques applied by amateur investigators, showing how even the most obscure puzzle can be cracked with publicly available information and a little digital forensics.
The actual breakthrough came from OSINT-style research in local newspaper archives, when a Redditor found an old article mentioning the band FEX. Radio and broadcast OSINT were also used to access radio archives, and manual audio fingerprinting and spectral analysis were performed to identify the song. HUMINT (Human Intelligence through Social Media ultimately solved the case by tracking down the Hädrich family and verifying the song through direct communication with the band.
The most mysterious song on the Internet was identified because of persistent human curiosity, local language knowledge, and deep context.