The 17-Year Hunt For The ‘Internet’s Most Mysterious Song’ Ends With An Unbelievable Discovery
A global mystery has been solved—and it only took almost two decades.
There’s a certain kind of internet mystery that doesn’t just get solved, it gets hunted. For 17 years, people chased a blank spot in the music world, a song that showed up nowhere and somehow still managed to haunt everyone who heard the tiniest scraps of it.
The trail started with siblings uploading a cassette recording, the kind of low-fi artifact that makes you think you’ve found a forgotten New Wave gem from the ’80s. Then it hit Reddit in 2019, and suddenly r/TheMysteriousSong turned into a full-on global investigation, pulling in tens of thousands of members and even news coverage. The complication? Nobody could prove where the track came from, and every lead fizzled.
Then marijn1412 stumbled onto the missing link, and the “internet’s most mysterious song” finally turned out to have a real band behind it.
Subways Of Your Mind by FEX.
When the siblings’ cassette recording stayed absent from every music database, the mystery basically became a game of musical hide-and-seek that nobody could win.
Once the track landed on r/TheMysteriousSong in 2019, the hunt went from “maybe it exists” to “we need answers,” and marijn1412 was soon digging through the past too.
The journey of this internet enigma began when the siblings first uploaded the cassette recording of the song. It didn’t show up in any music databases, leading many to believe it was an obscure New Wave track from the '80s.
Things took a dramatic turn when the song found its way to Reddit in 2019. The r/TheMysteriousSong subreddit exploded with activity, drawing tens of thousands of members from around the globe, and suddenly, the search became a worldwide mission.
This unknown song became the internet’s new white whale. The global attention even spilled into news outlets and drew in music detectives from every corner; sadly, all attempts to find the track remained futile.
Just when it seemed like the mystery might remain unsolved forever, a breakthrough surfaced thanks to marijn1412. While researching a 1980s event for up-and-coming bands, the amateur sleuth unearthed a clue.
This led him to reach out to FEX—a four-piece band from Kiel, Germany, whose music never made it far beyond regional fame. When marijn1412 contacted the former members, one of them, 68-year-old Michael Haedrich, confirmed that the song was indeed theirs.
It was titled Subways of Your Mind and had been hiding in plain sight all these years. The former keyboardist and guitarist for FEX told Der Spiegel, “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.”
This feels like the same kind of fight as a friend refusing to pay for damage caused by his pet.
The breakthrough came when marijn1412 uncovered a clue tied to a specific 1980s event for up-and-coming bands, then reached out to FEX, the Kiel group nobody expected to be involved.
Michael Haedrich, the former keyboardist and guitarist, confirmed it was their song, Subways of Your Mind, which means the “lost” track was actually sitting in plain sight for decades.
Now, with newfound attention, FEX plans to reissue Subways of Your Mind and is working to locate the original recording. For Haedrich and his bandmates, success came at a snail’s pace, but when it arrived, it hit like lightning.
This 40-year-old tune finally found its audience, proving that no song is ever truly forgotten—not when the internet decides it’s worth finding.
Now FEX has to find the original recording, and the internet is finally ready to listen.
For another Reddit-fueled family blowup, read why someone was labeled TA after revealing their non-binary sibling’s baby’s gender.
Jesse
