Lostwave

"Lostwave is a term and genre standing for songs/tracks with little to no known information, background, or origin." - Lostwave's Finest Wiki. Important to note, not all Lostwave is lost media. Some unidentified songs only have small snippets and no full versions, thus the full version is lost media. Other lostwave has the full song accessible, it is just unidentified, so it is not lost media.

You may be familiar with Lostwave already, you might know some songs from The Golden Age of Lostwave, like The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet or Everyone Knows That. The community is not as popular as it was during these searches, and that's a shame, because there is a plethora of songs out there that need help identifying.

Lostwave songs will also usually have an accompanying image just as a placeholder; when it doesn't, it's usually too unknown so it hasn't been assigned an image, or it has a video instead, in the very rare case.

Lostwave Cases I'm Interested In

	Your Eyes This song was first uploaded to old Chinese dance music websites in Eurodance compilations, which also happen to contain other unidentified songs. It was under the name 欧美抒情高档 Pop/European and American Lyric High-end Pop, so that doesn't help much. It's a really catchy Eurodance, Eiffel 65-style song, and it sounds too familiar to be forgotten. It also kinda pisses me off a bit, because it seems some people are gatekeeping the title/artist, some dude on Youtube named FM120 said "DO NOT ask me about Radio Rise / Jungle Eyes / Your Eyes (Come Back 2 Me), or I will assume you don't know dance music at all..." like he owns the fucking genre or some shit. This search is on hold cause of stuff like that, and the only way we can find it is through finding the original person who made the compilation with track names and stuff. Read more here.
CIA This is a new wave, post-punk style song recorded off of Canadian radio back in 1984. Many leads have been investigated and turned up nothing at all, meaning that this song has stayed unidentified for over 40 years now. There's a theory that it could be some kind of demo tape part of the radio station's talent search, so at the moment many people are investigating all kinds of amateur bands from around the timeframe. We have the full song, and have tried searching up all kinds of different titles relating to the lyrics, like "Coming Home", "Season at the CIA", etc. I'm just surprised a song with such a certain release date and such clear lyrics can be so unknown for so long. Read more here.
	Wait Forever The song was first uploaded to YouTube back in 2011, with the description saying it was sent to them labeled "In Tensions - Wait Forever", however the issue is that there is no online record of any band named In Tensions. The uploader got it from Soulseek, but others have said the song was from a lost compilation/mixtape of local German bands. This is one of the cases of Ironic Lostwave Lyrics, a running joke in the community that many lostwave songs have songs about it waiting to be found, or about it being lost, in this case it's "Do I have to wait forever?" The song has been living in my head since I first heard it and if it doesn't get solved, it needs to start paying rent. Read more here.
Shadows This was first discovered in a Sonic AMV by a Reddit user wanting to know the name of the song. It was soon discovered that this song belonged to a list of misattributed Nightwish songs. Nightwish originally announced an album on April Fool's 2007 called "Faster Harder Nightwish", but uploaders on filesharing sites took the bait and started circulating presumed promo tracks from the album, but obviously the tracks were not Nightwish. It's most likely assumed that these songs are all from the same band, but which band is unknown. Just one of the many, MANY cases of misattributed music from peer2peer sites. Read more here.
	Everyday Is Work-Work Another mysterious new wave song, now posted by user Guglielm on the New Wave Outpost and WatZatSong. It was recorded off of radio around 1981-1984, and has been attributed to Progressive Aid, but nothing about them has been found. Of course, this song is also really catchy, but also, someone on the WatZatSong post posted a lead for a song called Work Work by Matt Colias and John Kabelka in a copyright entry, registered in 1984. The only info I could find about Matt Colias is on Spokeo, but you need to pay money in order to get even just an email address. :( Read more here.
You Owe Me Satisfaction Someone posted outtakes from Italian TV to YouTube in 2019, saying the two guys dancing at the end made him laugh too much. It was recorded from NTV in Bologna, and had two guys dancing to an Italo Disco song, the two men and the song still being unidentified to this day. Admittedly, the video is absolute vibes, the dudes' moves are amazing and the song is such an earworm, makes me wanna dance too lol. One of the rarer cases of Lostwave having an accompanying video. Read more here.
	Forget the Pain This one is really interesting. Someone on YouTube uploaded this in 2009 saying it was a preview of a new Christina Aguilera song, and while it sounds like a demo, it's not seen anywhere else on the internet like many other leaks do. It's also really really short. However, it sounds almost exactly the same as Christina's song from 2008, "Keeps Gettin' Better". Though usually, in cases of demos, the songwriter will usually sing the demo, and Keeps Gettin' Better was written by Christina Aguilera and Linda Perry, and that is neither of them singing. Not to mention this video was released way after Keeps Gettin' Better had been out, so it's mostly speculated that the uploader made it themselves. Read more here.
Belinda's Song Not much info about this one, but you know a bunch of kids had toy phones that would play Butterfly by smile.dk? (ddr fans rise up) Well Belinda is kinda like that, she's a dancing doll that plays a song and dances to it. But here's the catch: what song is it? That's what many people have been trying to find out. There are multiple dancing dolls with this same song playing from it, but nobody knows what it is. There was a similar case, where someone owned a camel plush that played a song when you pressed it, but it was eventually identified as Sister Sister by Java. So if that can happen, there is a chance we will find Belinda's song. Read more here.
	Come to Me Now we get into crazy territory. This 4 second snippet was used as a jingle for Bosnian radio station Radio Bobovac, and was posted to WatZatSong by someone looking to identify it. Some person said they contacted the DJ who wrote it, but they never got a reply. You may think this one's hard to find cause it's so short, but people can find anything so I wouldn't put it past them. Read (maybe) more here.
Be Yellow Stay with me on this one. A person on WZS uploaded this sample looped over again multiple times, most of his posts being taken down because spam, but it's just a one second, low quality snippet of something, maybe a song that sounds like "Be Yellow" followed by a sharp noise. People say it sounds like a horn, I think it sounds like a violin. I am so obsessed with this snippet cause this could be anything, and however it decides to be solved, the result will send me into a frenzy. Read (maybe) more here.
	Cassie And now, for undoubtedly the weirdest sample on this list. "Cassie" is a dark electronic, sound-collage-type "song" recorded by two different people from CKUT, a Canadian college radio station. They seem to be known for their weirder, choppier, exxperimental projects aire on their various radio shows, and there are other examples of songs/tracks recorder from CKUT with the same vibe as Cassie, some of which have been identified, so there's hope for this one. Most notably, it includes a sample from what seems to be a movie or TV show, with a woman very angry at a "Cassie". My theories on this is that maybe the sample could be from porn? I thought about Come On You Slags! by Aphex Twin and how that song samples dialogue from a 70s porn movie, but I haven't found much to support this theory yet. I also emailed CKUT to see if they have any information about the track/snippet, but they haven't responded yet. Cassie is so intriguing to me, it's probably my most sought-after snippet thus far, cause it's so different to other Lostwave samples I've heard, and it lines up pretty good with the music I'm interested in. Read (maybe) more here.

Favourite Solved Songs

There's A Man In 2009, a man recorded the song off of Ukranian radio and posted it to Soundcloud in hopes it would get identified. The search remained cold until 2024, when someone simply searched YouTube for "The man on the hill before:2013" and found a live performance. On February 19th 2024 it was identified as The Defended - Man on A Hill. Fun fact: lead vocalist of The Defended, David, is very interested and active in the Lostwave community :D
	Dance for Hours a Day In 2007, someone uploaded a snippet of a song to Google Groups, and then to WatZatSong in hopes someone would recognise it. They ended up discovering another song labelled as RTP - You Don't Need Me, and because the singer sounded similar, they went and investigated. Someone else found a Discogs listing for a Royal Treatment Plant, with a song titled Funky. They found the Bandcamp, and on February 22nd 2024, the full song was identified as Royal Treatment Plant - Funky.
Digital Girl WatzatSong user "haditonvinyl" posted this song in 2023, saying he got it from an old mix CD of his uncle's. The song garnered a lot of attention because of it's familiarity to other songs of its kind, especially those included on the mix CD. However, people noticed the metadata of the song has FL Studio artifacts, but OP disputed this by saying he recorded it with FL Studio. Eventually people found a song called Lost In the Code by an artist named emails, and they had uploads on Soulseek. The Soulseek files had a date of 2012 compared to haditonvinyl's presumed date of 2008. People began to suspect that the song was a hoax, because of many holes in vinyl's story. People then discovered haditonvinyl was emails the entire time, because of various accounts, and an admission by emails himself. It was identified on April 4th 2024 as Lost in the Code by emails. emails claimed he did the hoax because he wanted to prove something about the lostwave community, or whatever, it was a very stupid reason, cause a lot of people's time was wasted searching. But unfortunately, the song is such a damn bop, I can't not listen to it.
	La Canción de Alicia A guy named Jitomate Triste (Sad Tomato) posted a clip to Facebook asking if anyone knew the song playing in the background of psychedelic GIFs from the movie Alice in Wonderland. Jitomate's account would be deleted, along with the post. Then, Daniel Gutiérrez posted a screen recording of Jitomate's post to a Latin American lost media Facebook group. After the search gained traction, a lead was discovered for a band called Gin & Tonic, and the bassist, Richardvox, took ownership of the song, posting a "full version", although people weren't fully convinced. In 2024, a Reddit user was having a conversation with someone who actually recognised the band, and on May 16th 2024, the song was identified as Dreams 4ever by Bad Influence. This has genuinely become one of my favourite songs of all time, it's so dreamy and it makes me feel a certain way, just gives me good vibes.
Like the Wind I don't even know if I have to summarize the search for this, you've probably heard it before. But in the shortest of terms, in 1984 a man named Darius recorded this song off of German radio station NDR, and in hopes to identify it his sister Lydia uploaded it to Spirit of Radio in 2007. It spread to WatzatSong, YouTube, and eventually Reddit in 2019 where it gained the most attention, sparking interest and starting a search. This lead to Whang! creating a video about it, which is where most people found out about it. After leads got discovered and closed for years, in 2024, a festival called Hörfest was found to have broadcast on NDR, and this lead people to a Michael Hädrich, part of a band named Phret and another named FEX. He confirmed FEX had a song called Subways of Your Mind, and sent the song through. This was on November 4th 2024, where the song was finally confirmed, after 40 years, to be Subways of Your Mind by FEX Not only is this song one of those that completely transport you, like Dreams 4ever, but it's important to me because I watched Whang's videos on the song before I even knew what Lostwave was, it was my first introduction to mysterious unidentified music.

My only problem is... a lot of Lostwave still creeps me out? Mostly when the snippet itself is scary to me or when the song sounds so familiar and identifiable but no one's been able to do it. Another reason is misattributed songs. I have a fear of what I can only describe as 'skinwalkers', like something that looks like someone you know very well but you know in your heart that is absolutely not that person, no matter how much they try to convince you. So like with Shadows, or Sexy Lady, or Please Come Home, the misattribution is like that skinwalker going "Guys it's me! It's me Nightwish/Michael Jackson/Paul McCartney!" but you know for a fact that it's not but everyone thinks it is.

I think also my obsession with musical information/metadata has something to do with it? Like most of the time you could play a song and I'd be like, "oh yeah, that's Dress by BUCK-TICK, released in 1993 on the album Darker than Darkness" (it's playing for me right now lol!), so if a song comes up and someone's like "hey what's this?" it's kinda jarring to be like... I don't know and no one does.

My point is, this is like my main interest but I can't indulge in it when the sun goes down, cause I have legit lost sleep from being so creeped out. The other day the power went out and I was fucked cause I couldn't play any YouTube video to help me fall asleep from being scared. It's gotten better the more I interact with it, like it's been exposure therapy? But it's still real spooky at times.