"Ulterior Motives," the Viral Lost Song, is Finally Fully Found
Christopher Saint Booth and Philip Adrian Booth announced this morning that the original masters have been located
The original 1985 master recording of “Ulterior Motives,” the Who’s Who? song that became a viral hit when a clip was posted to lostwave communities around the internet, has finally been recovered. Christopher Saint Booth and Philip Adrian Booth, the twin brothers who make up Who’s Who?, posted a clip from the song on YouTube early this morning to tease their upcoming documentary about the song’s discovery.
The Booth brothers have had a decades-long career that includes writing and recording pop music, scoring films (both traditional and adult), and directing feature-length narrative and documentary films. They’re blending some of those worlds with Ulterior Motives: The Story Behind the Song.
You can see their announcement video below.
Something worth mentioning: while the Booth brothers asked me, back in 2025, to contribute to their documentary, it didn’t happen due to scheduling. By the time they were in active development, I was working two jobs and couldn’t carve out the time.
Affectionately known by millions of fans as “Everyone Knows That” or “EKT — the title assigned to it by a user on an old Canadian music forum — the song became one of the internet’s most enduring lost media mysteries. In 2024, the Booth brothers were identified, and they recorded and released a new version of the song which garnered over 9 million streams.
While the re-recorded version satisfied demand for a clean recording, the true “Holy Grail” for the lost media collectors — a pristine analog master recorded in the mid-1980s — was long feared lost or irreparably degraded.
“To hold the tape in our hands is like stepping into a time machine,” said the Booth Brothers in a statement. “We knew the song lived in the hearts of fans, but we believed the actual master of that 1985 session was gone. Hearing it again in crystal-clear quality was an emotional experience bringing back the essence of the ‘80s. We just can’t wait to share.”
Who’s Who? has released six albums of archival material since “Ulterior Motives” was identified in April of 2024. The next, teased above, will be included with the documentary film. The band famously provided music for a number of adult films, but also featured one of their singles in a Disney Channel Original Movie.
The Booth brothers have found a whole new generation of fans as a result of the “Ulterior Motives” search, which saw thousands of music fans on Reddit and tens of thousands on TikTok exposed to the song before the Booths were even properly identified. Their music and films have all seen a spike in interest over the last two years.
