“Freaks” by Surf Curse

"Freaks" first turned up on Buds, Surf Curse's 2013 debut album, a surf rock rush that Nick Rattigan and Jacob Rubeck had written two years before. Eight years after that it found a second life: internet memes sent it racing across TikTok in 2021, the streams piled past 200 million, and Atlantic reissued it as a single that May.

Rubeck, the band's guitarist, has called the whole ride a strange one, and he's frank about what sits under the rush: a pretty bleak song, meant for the depressed and the alienated, of whom there are plenty. Adam Schulz, their A&R man at Atlantic, was struck first by how exhilarating it is, an energy he says runs through the band's whole catalog and lands even harder when they play live.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.