"Subways of Your Mind" is a single by German new wave band Fex, recorded in 1984. In 1985, a demo cassette tape containing the song was released to promote the band's live tour across Northern and Central Germany, with the tape itself being primarily sold at the tour. On 18 March 2007, a cassette tape recording from a radio broadcast in the mid-1980s was uploaded online and garnered significant attention. The song remained unidentified, even after being uploaded to the Internet, prompting a 17-year-long search to identify the artist and song title. During this search, the song earned the nickname "The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet".
The song was recorded privately in Wilhelmshaven from a radio broadcast during the mid-1980s, possibly around 1984. In 2019, it became the subject of a viral Internet phenomenon, with many users of sites such as Reddit and Discord collaborating to identify the song and recording artist.
On 4 November 2024, the song was identified by Reddit user u/marijn1412 as "Subways of Your Mind" by Fex, a rock band from Kiel. Confirmation came with the release of a 1985 EP featuring a studio version of the song, as well as a recording of a live performance in the same year. On 12 January 2025, the daughter of the band's keyboardist Michael Hädrich posted to the Reddit community formed around the song that her father had found a cassette copy of the NDR version that had been played on German radio around 1984. The copy was released as a digital single the following day. However, the ü master tape containing this version has yet to be found. On 4 November, a higher-quality version of the NDR broadcast version of the track was found on tape in lead singer Ture Rückwardt's archives and uploaded to Bandcamp, containing an extended fadeout.
"Subways of Your Mind" is one of the most famous examples of lostwave, which refers to music of obscure or unknown origins.
In a 2024 interview, Fex's keyboardist, Michael Hädrich, gave an account of the song's inspiration and meaning:
Three different studio recordings of this song are known to exist. The first time the song was recorded was sometime in June 1984, about a month before the NDR version, at a practice room building in Heikendorf. This recording is of worse sound quality than the later recordings. The bassist on this recording is Jörg Lemcke.
The second recording of the song took place between the rehearsal recording and the 1984 professional studio recording. This recording was once believed to have been made in 1983 with Volker Schenk, the original bassist of Fex, but this was proven false by Jörg Lemcke, who recalls the day Rückwardt came up with the song and started rehearsing it. This debunks the possibility of the song being recorded in 1983 or with Volker, as he had left to join a jazz band before the song was composed. This recording also could not have featured Norbert Ziermann, as he had not joined Fex at the time. It is unknown who played bass on this version, although the most likely candidates are Ture Rückwardt or Lemcke. This version of the song is dubbed as "The NDR recording" and was recorded in Löffelstudios at Ganderkesee. This is the version of the song that was aired on NDR. The intro on this recording is shorter than the other two, and this recording has a fade-out ending, while the others have proper endings. On one of the cassette copies, a new keyboard part is heard.
The third and professional studio recording of this song, which is featured on their 1985 EP which was sold at concerts, was recorded in November 1984 at Hawkeye Studios in Ganderkesee. The longer intro and ending from the Heikendorf recording is kept, with the NDR keyboard part being kept and developed. The bassist on this recording is Norbert Ziermann. Additionally, the lyrics between all three recordings feature minor differences.
Four live recordings of the song exist as well, although only three have surfaced. The first of these was recorded on June 9, 1984, which predates the Heikendorf recording, and features the same lineup, although Rückwardt's wife Ilona performs backing vocals on the recording. This recording has yet to surface. The second live recording was recorded in 1985 at the Roxy in Paderborn. The lineup on this recording is identical to that on the 1985 studio recording. The third live recording was the acoustic performance on NDR, performed on November 7, 2024. Hans-Reimer Sievers had not yet rejoined Fex at the time and was absent from this recording. The fourth live recording was recorded at a concert in 2025, and is the first electric performance of the song in many years. Sievers had left Fex for personal reasons by this point, so percussion is provided by Michael Hädrich.
A German teenager named Darius S. (from Wilhelmshaven) recorded the song from a German public radio station program in the 1980s. He recorded the song on a cassette tape and made a mixtape, which also included songs from XTC and the Cure. To get clean recordings of songs, Darius purposely removed dialogue from the radio hosts, which is likely why the exact airplay date and the title were unknown.
In 2004, Darius' older sister, Lydia H., bought him a website domain as a birthday present, which he used to raise awareness of the unidentified songs in his collection. He then digitized his radio recordings, saving the songs as .aiff and .m4a files, and uploaded them to his site, named Unknown Pleasures after the 1979 album by English post-punk band Joy Division.
On March 18, 2007, Lydia began her online search for the song on a Usenet group, but later migrated to websites with song identification tools. She posted a 1:15 excerpt of the song to best-of-80s.de (a German forum devoted to eighties synth-pop) and to The Spirit of Radio (a fan site dedicated to Canadian radio station CFNY-FM). The song slowly spread across the Internet, being uploaded to WatZatSong in 2009 and to YouTube in 2011. Spanish indie record label Dead Wax Records posted the excerpt of the song to their YouTube channel in 2017. This caught the attention of Gabriel Pelenson, a friend of Dead Wax owner Nicolás Zúñiga, who began searching for the song's origin in 2019.
Pelenson uploaded the excerpt of the song to his YouTube channel and many music-related Reddit communities, and eventually founded r/TheMysteriousSong. Searchers made contact with individuals potentially pertinent to the search, such as NDR disc jockey Paul Baskerville, German performance rights organization GEMA, and YouTube channel "80zforever", which posts obscure music. Baskerville agreed to play the song on his then-current radio show Nachtclub on July 21, 2019. Although no new leads came of it, it did make Lydia and Darius aware of the new wave of investigation, and Lydia subsequently became involved with the Reddit community in August.
Searchers generally agreed that the singer had a European accent, but the specific type was unclear at the time. Some users had theorized that the Yamaha DX7 synthesizer, which was released in late 1983, was used in the leads. This was later confirmed by Fex's keyboardist Michael Hädrich.
There had been some speculation that the song was recorded in 1984, since most of the other songs on the cassette tape were released around that time. Further evidence for this is that the Technics tape deck which Darius S. likely used to record the song was manufactured that year.
NDR Radio disc jockey Paul Baskerville, who was approached in 2019 but did not remember playing the song, suspected that it was a demo recording that was played once by a radio presenter and then thrown away.
One article from March 2021 claimed that the song was likely written and performed by Viennese singer Christian Brandl and drummer Ronnie Urini in 1983, with both German and English versions. The song would have been recorded in the studio of the late Fred Jakesch on MariahilferstraÃÂe in Vienna. Alto saxophonist Heinz Hochrainer said he was present for a planned saxophone element, but that was never recorded. A preliminary mix of the song then would have made its way to a radio station in 1984. Urini corroborated the story and also provided an old typewritten version of the German lyrics as evidence. However, Robert Wolf, Brandl's musical colleague and the frontman of their band Chuzpe, invalidated the argument, saying that he did not recognize Brandl's voice in the song and that the drums sounded more like an electronic drum machine than Urini. Following the discovery of the song's name and band, Urini claimed to the press that the recordings that had surfaced were forged by AI, and that he did not want to be further involved with the search.
On May 27, 2019, Australian music news website Tone Deaf wrote the earliest article focusing on the song, with author Tyler Jenke discussing the preliminary stages of the search for the track and noting that the search was similar to a 2013 search for a song which was ultimately identified as "On the Roof", the English version of "Lämna nÃÂ¥gonting kvar" by Swedish musician Johan Lindell.
Between 2019 and 2021, American YouTuber Justin Whang posted five episodes of his series Tales from the Internet discussing the song and the progress of the search. His videos further galvanized Internet users to contribute to the effort to identify the song.
In addition, a number of covers and remixed versions of the song have been created, including a cover by American band Mephisto Walz titled "Like the Wind" and released on their 2020 album All These Winding Roads.
In March 2023, the song was used in MyHouse.wad, a Doom II mod posted to the Doomworld forums by the pseudonymous user "Veddge". As described in PC Gamer, "you can find it playing from the open door of a lonely car, several layers deep into the inception-style madness that plagues the mod". The song's cryptic nature led it to be widely associated with the "liminal space" internet aesthetic.
After its identification, the song made a licensed appearance in the 2025 horror film Black Phone 2; the film is set in 1982, and an early scene has the character Finney (Mason Thames) watching an episode of the variety series Night Flight, which airs a "Subways of Your Mind" music video.
On November 4, 2024, Reddit user u/marijn1412 claimed to have identified the song as "Subways of Your Mind" by the German band Fex. While researching bands who participated in Hörfest, an annual event highlighting lesser-known musical artists, the user contacted a Fex band member listed in an issue of the German newspaper . According to the user, the band member confirmed that Fex was the creator of the song and planned to re-release it as a result of it being unearthed. One member of Fex, Michael Hädrich, confirmed the story to German tabloid tz, while the band's lead singer, Ture Rückwardt, participated in an interview with the Kiel newspaper Kieler Nachrichten, further corroborating the story. On November 7, 2024, three of the four original members of the band, Hädrich, Rückwardt and bassist Norbert Ziermann, performed an acoustic version of the song for the German radio station NDR 1 Welle Nord in Kiel. On October 1, 2025, the band officially released the music video for the song, featuring Darius.