About a month ago, ‘s friends started sending her obscure TikTok videos that used her song with Clean Bandit, “Symphony.” The posts had random observations or dark self-loathing messages — like “I have social anxiety,” “I’m scared of people,” and “I’m pregnant and it’s yours” — written over images of dolphins flying in a Lisa Frank-esque world. The posts were quite strange, with some getting a few thousand likes.
“I was like, ‘Why is this getting so much attention?’” the pop star remembers thinking. “And then boom, the whole internet started thinking it was funny.”
Over the last several weeks, users on TikTok have kept breathing new life into Larsson and Clean Bandit’s 2017 song by posting photos and videos of flying, colorful dolphins juxtaposed with brooding captions. According to TikTok, “Symphony” has been featured in more than 2.2 million videos on the platform, and it even reached Number One on the Billboard TikTok Chart last week.
Larsson and Clean Bandit are confused about how this all started — but they’re down to ride the wave.
“If my manager came up to me, like, ‘Hey, I have an idea for how we would make this song go off’ and then they would explain this trend to me, I would have been like, ‘Are you fucking dumb?’” says Larsson. “This is just something that started organically and grew.”
Larsson posted her own version of the trend two weeks ago, simply writing, “What the fuck is going on” over the dolphin aesthetic. She thinks the meme template has introduced her voice and Clean Bandit’s song to thousands of Gen Alpha TikTok users, who may have never heard the track when it first made waves seven years ago.
Clean Bandit, too, has been impressed by the song’s new turn. They shared that “FML memes” sparked by “Symphony” align with the original intention of the song. “Gen Alpha have latched onto the original feeling of the melodies and chords that we wrote,” the band told Rolling Stone in an email. “Because what no one knows is that when we first wrote the song, the lyrics (by Amaar Malik) were completely different.”
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Instead of “When you’re gone, I feel incomplete/So, if you want the truth/I just wanna be part of your symphony,” the original lyrics went, “But with you gone/I can hear my heart/And if you want the truth/Music sounds better without you.”
“The dolphin memes tap into this original lyricism that was inspired by the chords in the first place!” the band says. “So it is very interesting to us.”
Larsson and her friends have theories about how the trend even started and what could’ve inspired its surge. She thinks it may have been indirectly inspired by a real, lavender, singing diary, sold a few years back, that played “Symphony” every time you unlocked it. “People made jokes about writing very dark stuff in their diaries,” Larsson says. “They’ll put in the code to write about their horrible day and then the song starts playing.”
“The TikTok trend became the shorter version of that: saying something dark on this Lisa Frank dolphin background in the similar way you would in the diary,” she theorizes.
The song’s popularity on the app has also reminded Larsson to use social media to her advantage, and not be afraid to promote her music — and her upcoming solo tour — on the platform. She shared a video of herself with the song in the background, alongside the caption, “Trying to think of ways to milk this dolphin trend so I can sell out my U.S. tour.” She’s also incorporated the dolphin visuals in her tour set, nodding to the trend as she sings the song live.
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“I’m walking the tightrope of having fun with it, incorporating it as a ‘wink, wink’ to everyone who knows what this is about, but also not overusing it and being corny, because I do feel like the song is incredible,” she says of the song. “It’s like an inside joke with whoever is getting it, but I didn’t want it to feel like it took over the song.”
“There’s nothing cringy about riding the wave of even a minor success that you’re having,” she adds. “If you continue to promote yourself and put yourself out there again and again, it might pop up a second time on their For You Page or a third and then they might be like, ‘You know what? Let me go and listen to this.’”
Ole Obermann, the Global Head of Music Business Development at TikTok, says the trend is reflective of the patterns of music discovery they see happen a lot on the platform. “Watching iconic tracks like this reach and excite a new generation of fans reaffirms the power TikTok holds in shaping the music landscape and providing a space for fans to show their support for their favorite artists and songs,” Obermann says.
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For now, Larsson and Clean Bandit are happy to see where “Symphony” takes them while working on new music. Larsson dropped her album Venus back in February, and Clean Bandit collaborated with Anne-Marie and David Guetta on an equally catchy single last month.
“It’s a fun trend on the internet, but if it made one or two or three people go in and actually get a ticket,” says Larson, “Then, fuck it!”
