It’s only 17 seconds long, and sounds a bit like 80s-era Genesis playing at the bottom of a swimming pool. But this snippet of bouncy yet sonically degraded pop has become one of the biggest and most enduring musical mysteries on the internet.
The clip was uploaded in 2021 by someone called Carl92, who wanted to know if anyone could identify it. “I don’t remember its origin,” he wrote on a site called WatZatSong, saying he found it “between a bunch of very old files in a DVD backup … it sounds somewhat familiar to me.” But even after the 17-second sample was posted on Reddit, where the mighty pop-culture hive mind rarely fails, not a single person managed to identify the song or the artist.
The quest has caught the public imagination. Last June it gained its own subreddit – named after the song’s unofficial title, Everyone Knows That (Ulterior Motives), or EKT – which now has about 27,000 members. And lately TikTok has caught on, with predictable results: users have piled in with unhelpful comments such as: “Have you tried Shazaming it?”, which is the equivalent of telling someone who has lost their keys to check their pockets.
Bas, a music journalist from the Netherlands, is one of the subreddit’s moderators. He believes the quest has blown up partly because of cultural changes. “We live in a time when knowledge is freely available to us and we can consume music without much restriction,” he says. “Music that is lost in pre-internet times is likely very interesting to younger people, because it’s such a foreign thing to them, to not be able to simply look up the song.”
A 20-year-old content creator with the nom de plume Kylie Boggly is one such convert. “We’re entering a prime time for lost media that is going to be looked upon very fondly in the future and I’m grateful I can be a part of it,” she says.
She points out that EKT is the most visible manifestation of the “lostwave” movement, which collects dusty, forgotten tunes – recorded from the radio, perhaps, or buried in a folder of old MP3s – and tries to put a name and artist to them. “There is another unidentified song which has been called “the most mysterious song on the internet”, that mystery hasn’t been solved for nearly two decades. But I think EKT has surpassed its popularity,” Boggly says. “It does seem improbable for the artist to never be found.”
One stumbling block is that no one can quite agree on the lyrics, thanks to the poor sound quality. There is even some doubt about whether the singer is male or female. But internet sleuths have identified the drum machine and synth used for the song – most likely the LinnDrum and Yamaha DX7 – which narrows down its release date to sometime after 1983. They have even analysed the background frequencies and worked out the format of the DVD that Carl92 seems to have been playing. Beyond that, forensic analysis has failed to nail it down.
Dozens of similar-sounding artists (Roxette, Savage Garden, the guy who sang the Pokémon TV series theme song) have all been asked if it was their song, but with no luck. Naturally, hoaxes have flourished. Bas recalls a Redditor claiming to have heard it in a Polish McDonald’s. “This person ended up fabricating emails from companies to keep the search community believing we were about to find the song,” he says. “Points for creativity, I suppose.”
The song may well have been an unreleased demo, or an advertising jingle. Bas’s theory is that it was created in the US for a film or advert, “and eventually ended up on a VHS tape. Someone was recording sound in their room while the VHS tape was playing in the background, and backed up the file to a DVD and forgot about it.” Others think it may hail from Japan. Currently, Boggly says, the searchers are trying to get in touch with an obscure singer called White Mike Johnny Glove, “who has a strikingly similar voice” – watch this space.
As for Carl92, he has vanished, perhaps wary of being pestered for clues by online sleuths. Some say he must have staged the whole thing – could it be a snatch of music he generated using AI, perhaps? If so, he has successfully trolled tens of thousands of people. But there is no evidence to suggest he was anything but genuine. The disheartened tone of his near-final message, which came only a few months after he posted EKT, certainly rings true. “It’s a dead end,” he wrote. “Anyway, I’ve lost interest in the song.” The rest of the world, however, was just getting started.
