Everyone Knows That: how the internet became obsessed with lostwave

It’s late at night and you’re searching. For what exactly, you’re not sure, but perhaps something ASMR-infused – a video equal parts soothing and strange that’ll lull you gently to sleep, while reminding you of the vast expanse of the internet. As you navigate YouTube’s complex warrens of ‘dark’ and ‘unsettling’ video essays, you see a familiar thumbnail crop up, sandwiched between playlists of unsolved true crime cases and Tumblr lore icebergs. An image of a hot pink boombox, set against furry cushions of the same colour, that wouldn’t look out of place on a Depop Y2K listing. You click on one of these videos, and then you hear it for the first time: a low-quality recording of an upbeat, 80s pop song performed by a singer with an accent you can’t quite place. The most mysterious 17 seconds on the internet. 

The weirdest thing about the most mysterious 17 seconds on the internet is that you feel like you’ve heard them before. Open up any of the thousands of videos about the unidentified audio clip dubbed “Everyone Knows That” or “Ulterior Motives”, and the comments are flooded with users claiming to recognise it. It’s someone my dad went to school with. A band my sister used to listen to. My mum swore she heard this on the radio in Canada in the 90s. Ever since the snippet was first uploaded by user carl92 on Watzatsong in 2021, its eerily familiar melody has echoed across the internet, first finding its place in YouTube’s library of lost media, before going viral more recently over on TikTok. There, videos dissecting its lyrics and describing it as a “parallel universe” version of anthemic 80s hits like Madonna’s “Material Girl”, have amassed over 500,000 views.

As always, the epicentre of the mystery is located on Reddit. Redditor u/twinseylohan moderates the r/everyoneknowsthat subreddit – a rapidly expanding community of 29,000 sleuths who spend their free time searching for the origin of the lost song, suspected to be anything from an obscure Italo disco demo to a Japanese car commercial. Like many of the sub’s other moderators, he believes that the appeal of “Everyone Knows That” comes down to a sense of frustration around not being able to find something in a world where everything is accessible at our fingertips. “With the internet, especially younger generations who have grown up with it, you have this notion that you can find anything easily,” he tells Dazed. “Then when you can’t, that’s a really interesting thing. Why can't we find it?”

There’s a feeling of awe too for many “EKT” fanatics, that in an increasingly stale online landscape where activity is limited to the same three websites, there are still blind spots that we can’t identify, and that force us to divert from our usual digital dwellings. “It opens up this world on the internet that you don’t think about,” twinseylohan says. “You see how many commercials from other countries there are and you understand how there can be lost songs and jingles. It's bigger than Hollywood.”

“EKT” doesn’t exist as an anomaly, either. The internet has countless sonic black holes, collectively called ‘lostwave’ – an umbrella term for unidentified songs ranging from similar short clips, to full tracks discovered on dusty, unlabelled cassettes in someone’s basement, and uploaded to an online world they don’t entirely belong in. Before “EKT”, the most viral was arguably “The Most Mysterious Song” or “Like The Wind”, a song that has remained unidentified since 2007, and that itself boasts a subreddit of over 40,000 avid hunters. Just like “EKT”, “The Most Mysterious Song” features elements that could now be called hallmarks of the lostwave genre: an 80s sound, a singer with an undiscernible accent (many associate it with Germany or Eastern Europe) and blurry lyrics that spark debate (is it “like the wind”, or “blind the wind”?) These characteristics blend together to create music that feels amateur or unfinished, but that, in another timeline, could conceivably have been a massive hit, instilling us with a displaced longing for the past. “It's based on that nostalgia that was never there, you know?” twinseylohan adds. “Like the vaporwave aesthetic and new wave, this created aesthetic of the 80s or 90s.” 

In this way, lostwave evokes the same sense of hauntology as vaporwave, and becomes not just a term for unidentified songs, but also an aesthetic in its own right — faux-nostalgia represented by retro motifs like “EKT”’s pink boombox. And not unlike similar internet phenomena such as the Mandela Effect and the backrooms, lostwave and its surrounding aesthetic is so compelling to fans, because of the dual sense of comfort and uncanniness it produces. “It’s intriguing and frightening at the same time, that something requiring such effort to produce and release is so ephemeral,” says lostwave enthusiast and Redditor Kvaot, who has been a part of the community for about a year. Another fan, habanadhalia200, shares a similar sentiment. “The idea of a song being once popular and decades later being unidentified with only a snippet being circulated is genuinely something that both interests me and invokes a sense of uncanny valley,” they say. “It’s just a really unique side of the internet.”

“It’s intriguing and frightening at the same time, that something requiring such effort to produce and release is so ephemeral” – Kvaot

There’s a vibe of liminality, too, and it’s perhaps for this reason that so many lostwave songs, including the recently identified “How Long” (“How Long Will It Take” by Paula Toledo), hail from DVD menus; transitory checkpoints that exist between destinations, and that have been all but forgotten in the modern world. Lostwave then, seems to be a natural continuation of the internet’s chronic obsession with liminal spaces, with video essayists like ShaiiValley pointing out that “EKT” “sounds like a song you would hear playing through faulty speakers in an abandoned mall”.

But what about when the internet’s liminal sounds are pinned down to a time and place? This is what happened to Panchiko, a band whose long-lost 2000 EP D>E>A>T>H>M>E>T>A>L arguably marked the beginning of the lostwave boom, when it was found in a charity shop in 2016 and posted to 4chan’s /mu/ board. Fans were captivated by the EP’s distorted, lo-fi sound, characterised by heavy disc rot from years of degradation, and characteristic of lostwavers’ obsession with raw, fuzzy audio. Once internet sleuths managed to track Panchiko down four years later and verify the EP, Owain, Andy and Shaun reformed the band they’d abandoned back in high school. “It was an amusing curio when we first found out about it, and then we decided that maybe we could make a few CDs for the people who are interested,” guitarist Andy tells Dazed. “And it’s just kind of gone a bit crazy ever since.”

By ‘crazy’, the band presumably mean the one million monthly listeners they have accumulated on Spotify (many of whom have discovered them organically, unaware of their lore), their new album, and upcoming North American tour. By all accounts they are a lostwave success story, proof of the community’s ability to transplant misplaed artists into the timeline they diverged from decades prior. And though Panchiko are keen to be recognised for their own merit in 2024, they still respect the online movement that shaped them. Vocalist Owain likens the appeal of lostwave to an old-school music distribution system that values the role of community and incentivises individual discovery. “People want to have that word-of-mouth thing. ‘I got this from a community of people who are like-minded.’ Like how music used to be, when it was made on little tapes and passed around.”

@atlas_plus Lost media axtuslly scares me. I straight up cant sleep over this #fyp #xyz #lostmedia #panchiko #80s #everyoneknowsit #music #mysterioussong #please #somebody #findthissongplease #viral #foryou ♬ Ekt lost song - LITHIUM🎸

Efforts to dig up lost tracks and resurrect old artists to Panchiko-esque levels of fame have been amping up more in recent weeks, as songs like “EKT” storm TikTok, and online lostwave communities streamline their searches by pulling resources together. Although sometimes tracks are identified by lone wolves (a song nicknamed “There’s a Man” was finally found by Redditor TrippyDrew last week, after he located a grainy performance uploaded to YouTube in 2008), others operate highly efficient systems organised in Discord servers, or sprawling spreadsheets charting current contacts and debunked leads. The armchair detectivism these searches attract (typical of an internet increasingly characterised by amateur vigilante journalism) can be extreme, and moderators generally discourage people from mass messaging retired musicians on their personal Facebook pages. “We encourage the person who came up with the idea to be the only one to message and everybody to stick by that. We don’t encourage 100,000 people to harass these people, and we don't allow for doxxing of any sort,” twinseylohan clarifies. 

This too, he explains, extends to carl92, the elusive OP of the “Everyone Knows That” clip, whose early abandonment of the search has led many to believe that the snippet is an elaborate hoax, either written and recorded by carl92 himself in 2021, or generated with AI. For Panchiko, too, conspiracy theories continue to persist, with some fans still believing that D>E>A>T>H>M>E>T>A>L’s distortion effect was a deliberate addition, and proof that the CD was a modern recording planted to propel the band to worldwide fame.

Although the band reiterate that the idea that they “ordered 20 CDRs, copied [our music] onto that” and “created a new plugin that does disc rot”, is ridiculous, it doesn’t seem implausible just four years later, that a bloated lost media market, twinned with the increasingly powerful capabilities of AI, could create an environment rife for bandwagon jumping. After all, artists are already covering lostwave tracks to take advantage of their current copyright-free status, and generating the remainder of their lyrics with AI in attempts to trick the subreddit’s sleuths. “You can now make deepfakes from your personal computer. You could say, AI, create me a video of an 80s band playing the song,” Panchiko’s Owain postulates, of new tech like OpenAI’s text-to-video generator. 

And what if lostwave giant “Everyone Knows That” is a cleverly designed hoax? Or even worse, a poor-quality audio clip that is no longer than its 17-second runtime? Will the hunters be disappointed, if the song turns out to be a mere 20-second-long jingle for a furniture company? For twinseylohan, there’s an inevitable sense of melancholy that will come with the resolution of the search. “When you get everything that you ever wanted, there’s always an emptiness about that,” he reflects. “Maybe we’ll move on to something else. Or maybe it becomes a fan page dedicated to the creators and memes and nostalgia, looking back at all of the ridiculousness.” With the fleeting, meandering nature of lostwave songs and their searches, it seems obvious that the internet’s most nomadic sleuths will find a new home, transitioning from one lost song to the next. There will always be another corridor to go down, abandoned track to follow, empty mall to explore. There has to be. Because once everything online is solved, then what?