Never heard of them: The hit songs returning to charts as TikTok, movies and TV introduce them to Gen Z

Every generation thinks they’re the first to discover some cool piece of “arcane” culture, just as it is the job of every generation older than them to roll their eyes at such claims.

The virality of social media trends, whether organic or, more likely, manufactured, has seen a second (or third or fourth or fifth) life given to songs from past eras as young people learn of them for the first time through a new TV show or movie.

With cultural memory shortening — think of every time a Gen Z-er or Alpha looks confused at a cassette tape — it feels more likely now that a 15-year-old would claim ignorance about Prince than a Gen Y-er would’ve said the same about The Beatles.

Culture has fractured into niche silos, everyone’s individual yums are catered for, and there are fewer moments of the metaphorical watercooler moment.

But when social media grabs onto something, it really, really does.

Most recently, it’s the Robyn song Dancing On My Own, which is enjoying a renaissance thanks to its significant use in the streaming movie Voicemails for Isabelle.

Robyn’s song was released in 2010, and has over the past decade and a half become a favourite, notably as a LGBTQI+ anthem thanks to its danceability and themes of embracing your independence.

And for a lot of Gen Y women, its strongest screen association is Lena Dunham’s TV show, Girls, which memorably placed it at the end of the third episode of the first season in 2012 but now for a different swathe of people, it has a whole new context.

It’s always a surprise when someone tells you that young people are just now discovering something you’ve assumed is just well-known. How could that possibly be, surely not? But Google search data tells a different story.

In the past month, searches for Dancing On My Own are up 1250 per cent on the previous month, and up 4000 per cent on the same period a year ago. Voicemails For Isabelle, which uses the song several times over the film and is a key emotional device, was released on June 19.

Dancing on My Own also reached one million streams in a single day for the first time on June 30, a combination of Voicemails for Isabelle and global Pride Month.

Last week, the Legally Blonde prequel series Elle was released, and it uses Scottish alternative rockers Garbage’s 1995 hit Only Happy When it Rains as its theme song. Google trends has seen that spike 700 per cent over the previous week and more than 5000 per cent over the same period in 2025.

For artists whose peaks were seemingly in the past, a youth-fuelled social media trend can be lucrative.

Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s Murder On The Dance Floor was massive at the turn of the millennium, and remains a club hit but saw a mainstream resurgence thanks to Emerald Fennell’s 2023 movie Saltburn, which featured a completely nude Barry Keoghan swanning through the mansion his character killed to inherit.

That movie had some of the most talked-about cinema moments of that year (the bathtub semen water was another) and the Ellis-Bextor song was the perfect pick to score Keoghan’s dastardly triumph.

It put the British artist back in the conversation and the song returned to the charts for the first in two decades. It also had its biggest streaming day ever on Spotify, and Ellis-Bextor later embarked on a 110-date tour which included stops in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth.

She later told GQ, “It’s cool, isn’t it? It’s really fun. The thing I’ve always loved about what I do is that you never know what’s around the corner. If you want a predictable life, don’t be a musician.”

Similarly, once you get over the fact that whole generations of people didn’t already know that ethereal gem of an artist, the mesmerising Kate Bush, there was also the good news story in 2022 of Running Up That Hill going to number one on the charts in the UK and Australia, among others, and for the first time in the US hit the top five.

Almost 40 years after Bush released the song in 1985, it spiked thanks to Stranger Things, which featured it heavily in its fourth season, as something of an anchor anthem for Sadie Sink’s character, Max.

Bush told the BBC it was extraordinary. “I thought the track would get some attention, but I just never imagined that it would be anything like this.

“It’s so exciting, but it’s quite shocking, really, isn’t it? I mean, the whole world’s gone mad.”

Bush said the thought of young people hearing it for the first time was special.

Natasha Bedingfield similarly saw her 2004 pop hit, Unwritten, race back into the charts in 2024 after it was used in the Glen Powell and Sydney Sweeney rom-com Anyone But You. It peaked at number six in the UK in early 2024, and it was the first time Bedingfield had been in the top 20 in almost two decades.

There was something of a symbiotic relationship between that film and that song. There’s an argument that Anyone But You greatly benefitted from the nostalgia hit of Unwritten, and its use at the end of the film in a montage of the cast singing the upbeat pop ditty sent people out of the theatre bouncing and in a good mood.

Anyone But You had great word-of-mouth which carried it to a much bigger box office than anyone was expecting, and a lot of commentators and critics gave credit to Bedingfield’s song which evoked the mid-2000s mood, as well as its earlier association with a Gen Y favourite reality series, The Hills.

Young people “discovering” “new” things isn’t a modern phenomenon, but what’s changed is how social media, and especially videos on TikTok and Instagram, have the ability to re-unearth former favourites at alarming speed and ubiquity.

Obviously, Bush, Bedingfield, Robyn, Ellis-Bextor, The Cramps (Wednesday used Goo Goo Muck) and TATU (Heated Rivalry featured All the Things She Said) didn’t need this second wave to be cultural forces.

If nothing else, the next time a 17-year-old tells you about this excellent new thing that’s going crazy on social media, you can bask in the smug glow of knowing you got there first.