For the last 17 years, an army of online sleuths around the world have obsessively tried to find the name of what has been called “the most mysterious song on the internet.”

Now, after a serendipitous discovery by an intrepid researcher who triumphantly reported his discovery on the online forum Reddit, they know the answer: it’s called: “Subways of Your Mind” and was recorded by a little-known 1980s German band called FEX.

Michael Haedrich, 68, who plays keyboards, guitar and sings backup vocals for FEX, said the former band members were “absolutely stunned” by the news. Der Spiegel magazine.

He admitted that the group was unaware of the online phenomenon.

How did the mystery emerge?

The mystery began in 2007, when a German brother and sister uploaded to the Internet a song they had recorded on cassette from the radio in their youth and then digitized. as Rolling Stone Reported in 2019The tape featured mostly songs by popular bands like XTC and The Cure, as well as one particular song that has remained a mystery until now.

The German brothers asked for help in detecting this, and music enthusiasts soon took up the task.

The track did not appear in any music database, but online sleuths tried to find out which instruments could be heard and analyzed the lead singer’s accent.

Initial attempts to describe the song, which was soon classified by many as being in the 1980s “New Wave” genre, yielded little result.

When the track was uploaded to Reddit in 2019, global attention exploded.

A Reddit subforum “r/MysteriousSong” It attracted tens of thousands of members, and the hunt was reported in the German media and beyond.

The big breakthrough finally came earlier this week, when a user named “marijn1412” said she identified the song as “Subways of Your Mind.”

He said he came across former FEX members while investigating an event held by a public broadcaster in northern Germany for up-and-coming bands in the 1980s.

The Reddit user wrote that he reached out to members of a four-piece outfit from the northern city of Kiel, who sent him a version of the mysterious song and revealed the song’s long-sought name.

Marijn1412 wrote: “After I emailed him that the song was actually a pretty famous ‘lost song,’ he asked me not to make the song public until I spoke to the former band members. But in the meantime, the song was recorded at (German performing rights organization) GEMA and people found out about it but the band “I’m happy to say its members have accepted me making this public.”

Haedrich, who is currently a musician, told Spiegel that this was the first he had heard of the massive search effort.

“I thought it was surprising that someone would be interested in the music of a band that was only regionally successful, and that was over 40 years ago,” he said.

Haedrich, who lives in Munich, said the band members now want to re-release “Subways of Your Mind” and are trying to find the original recording of the song.

Their success may have been decades in the making, but “for us it just came,” he said.