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How Hoist the Colours became the official song of North Sea TikTok | The Verge

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The scariest sound on TikTok

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The scariest sound on TikTok

How one cover of one mostly unknown song became the soundtrack of terrifying vertical videos.

by David Pierce

David Pierce

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Jan 18, 2024, 3:30 PM UTC

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The scariest sound on TikTok

How one cover of one mostly unknown song became the soundtrack of terrifying vertical videos.

by David Pierce

David Pierce

Editor-at-Large

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Follow See All by David Pierce

Jan 18, 2024, 3:30 PM UTC

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David Pierce

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is editor-at-large and Vergecast co-host with over a decade of experience covering consumer tech. Previously, at Protocol, The Wall Street Journal, and Wired.

No one on North Sea TikTok ever seems to know how they got there. They were just innocently scrolling their feeds from dance challenge to gardening tip to relationship update to workout video to standup comedy clip, when suddenly, they’re dropped into some of the most treacherous waters on the planet.

The videos are almost always the same: 60 seconds of waves crashing over the hulls of unsuspecting ships, workers hanging off of oil rigs while storms roil around them, water coming onto the deck of a boat at such speed, you can’t imagine how even the camera survived. “I don’t know why my feed is filled with videos of the North Sea,” a thousand commenters always say, “but I love it.”

I can’t say exactly how the trend started (because TikTok’s platform search tools are horrifically bad), but I’m pretty sure most people found North Sea TikTok the same way I did. On November 27th, 2023, an account called @ukdestinations — which was for years dedicated to showing viewers unexpectedly cool things around the United Kingdom — posted a North Sea video. It was captioned, “The last clip will truly shock you,” and had on-screen text at the beginning that read, “The North Sea: the most treacherous sea in the world.”

_For more on North Sea TikTok, check out__this episode__of \_The Vergecast\_._

That TikTok now has more than 118 million views and was at least one of the first to adopt the clips and cuts that are now core to the North Sea TikTok aesthetic.

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