[1] 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.

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.

[8] 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.

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.

[10] 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.

[13] 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.

[16] 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.

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".

[23] 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 [de] in Kiel.