If you’ve heard the 2019 hit song “Tek It,” by the New York City-based band Cafuné, there’s a good chance it’s not the version that the group originally created. A clip on YouTube with more than six hundred thousand views features only the thirty-second chorus—a soaring refrain of “I watch the moon / Let it run my mood”—looped for ten minutes straight. Hundreds of commenters below say some variation of “I literally can’t stop listening to it.” Another version on YouTube speeds up the chorus, compressing even more loops into ten minutes; it, too, has hundreds of thousands of views. Other videos loop the track for longer, slow it down, or add reverb. These unofficial remixes, uploaded from unremarkable accounts, create a kind of Satie-esque audio overdose, pounding the band’s melody into abstraction, pure stimulus. They also demonstrate the malleability of culture in the era of user-generated content. With A.I.-augmented editing software instantly accessible online, no piece of art can rest safely as a finished product; almost anyone can offer up their own polished version of a song, a video, a text, an image to an online crowd. The audience dictates not only how a song is interpreted but, increasingly, what it sounds like and which versions get released—which can be frustrating for the artists behind it. “This is not a McDonald’s,” Noah Yoo, who forms one half of Cafuné, told me during a recent video call.

Yoo and his bandmate, Sedona Schat, met as students at New York University’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music and formed Cafuné in 2014, for a school assignment. (They were in the same class in which Maggie Rogers played her song “Alaska” for Pharrell Williams, producing a viral video clip that kick-started her career.) Yoo wears round wire-frame glasses and sweeps his dark hair back; Schat describes herself as a tomboy and keeps her hair in a pixie cut. Together, their aesthetic is nineties retro, with the look of detective protagonists from an after-school cartoon. They chose the name Cafuné from a list of evocatively untranslateable phrases; in Brazilian Portuguese, it describes the gesture of affectionately playing with a loved one’s hair. After graduating, Yoo wrote for Pitchfork, covering music news, and Schat worked in the restaurant industry. Cafuné finally produced a début album, “Running,” in 2021, when the pair found the time to record and release it themselves during the pandemic. For a year, it received largely local attention within the New York indie-music scene. Then, in 2022, they noticed that “Tek It,” the album’s second track, was getting a surge of inquiries on Shazam, the music-identification app. “There’s something strange happening,” Yoo recalled thinking. The attention was coming from TikTok, an app that the band didn’t even use. But someone had posted a sped-up version of “Tek It” to soundtrack an anime fan edit, and thousands, and then millions, of other users were picking up the sound to include in their own videos. (Sped-up remixes are part of an established internet genre called “nightcore.”) The song hadn’t been intentionally engineered for TikTok fame, but something about its Auto-Tuned combination of nostalgia and angst over a past relationship gave audiences a feeling that they desperately wanted to channel. “What you do has very little to do with if you’re chosen by the algorithmic gods,” Schat said. “It’s a literal slot machine.”

“Tek It” became one of the emblematic songs of TikTok’s rise in the United States. Riding its momentum, Cafuné signed to the major record label Elektra. “Everyone who goes viral is immediately pressed with the same task, which is to keep the ball in the air,” Yoo said. The band hustled to build their social-media accounts, play shows, and produce a new EP. They also put out an official sped-up version of “Tek It,” replicating the most popular online iteration. “Tek It” and its variations now have more than a billion streams on Spotify, a success by any measure. But the band’s boom was short-lived. In 2024, Cafuné was dropped from Elektra amid a wave of music-industry restructuring. “That amount of profit wasn’t enough to convince anyone of anything,” Yoo said. Cut loose, the duo decided to use their earnings to spend a whole year acting like a more traditional band: writing songs full time, guided by nothing other than their creative whims. They put together an album to release on their own independent label, Aurelians Club, and signed a distribution deal with SoundOn, TikTok’s in-house musician platform. Schat told me mordantly, “It’s funny that the TikTok corporation gave us more favorable terms than any label was capable of giving.” Every musician today is forced to become a content creator, “whether they want to be or not,” Yoo added. “It feels like we’ve all become, like, employees for platforms.”

“Bite Reality,” Cafuné’s new album, will come out on September 12th. It continues in the hard-charging, electro-acoustic vein of “Running,” inspired in equal parts by emo, shoegaze, and nineties Japanese rock, but deepens the band’s sound with more expansive instrumentation and subtler lyrics—evidence of post-viral maturity, perhaps. (From the sweet, autobiographical song “In My Pocket”: “I feel free to make my mistakes in front of you.”) Cafuné’s hooks are adept, but without an internet sensation to grab listeners’ attention their music risks getting lost in the thicket of individual musicians who cultivate stronger personae: Mk.gee, MJ Lenderman, Clairo. Bands, which submerge personalities in a collective identity, seem to have faltered lately as a unit of musical celebrity. One thing that distinguishes the latest album is a persistent theme of internet-induced ennui. Its lead single is “e-Asphyxiation,” a cathartic outcry against the self-commodification demanded by social media.“You gotta keep engagement high / I might as well not even try / who are all these people,” Schat sings over pounding drums and Yoo’s distortion-roughened guitar. She told me, “All of these things that one is supposed to do on the internet, like show the parties you’re going to or have this skill set of how to present your face and body to the camera—it just doesn’t feel like me.” The pair pasted a note in their studio with the words “high tech, low life” echoing the sci-fi novelist Bruce Sterling’s description of the author William Gibson, a pioneer of the cyberpunk genre, of which Cafuné’s vibe partakes. To them, the phrase conveyed the precious shreds of humanity that survive the dehumanizing effects of the internet. Despite all of our apps, “Bite Reality” avers, we still feel the same feelings: loneliness, thwarted ambition, unrequited love, wondering how to grow up or how to recapture youth.

Can independent musicians today survive without, as Schat puts it, giving their “life force to the internet?” Cafuné’s trajectory suggests a shift in the relationship between artist and consumer. “How much power does the audience really have?” Yoo said. “Turns out, they have tons of power.” Other musicians are explicitly shaping their outputs to meet the demands of social media. In 2024, the pop star Sabrina Carpenter released an EP featuring six versions of her hit “Espresso,” including a “Double Shot Version” that speeds up the track much like Cafuné did with “Tek It,” following the nightcore remixes of “Espresso” that were already floating around YouTube. In the run-up to “Bite Reality,” Cafuné has been posting on TikTok consistently, sharing clips from studio sessions, wacky dances, and lip-synchs. However much the band may want the focus to be on the music and their live performances, social media still offers the surest way to reach fans who likely discovered them on TikTok to begin with. Yoo remembered something he had said years ago, before Cafuné’s viral success, in a Pitchfork editorial meeting, which he recalls being met with scoffs at the time: “Memes are going to be more culturally significant to this next generation of music listeners than music.” Being a meme can be hard, but not being one may be even harder. ♦