Get the latest gossip

Everyone Knows That: can you identify the lost 80s hit baffling the internet?

Entire online communities have developed around naming this 17-second snippet of catchy pop – and three years after it was uploaded no one has solved the mystery

“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. 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. 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.

Get the Android app