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\u2019re dropped into some of the most treacherous waters on the planet.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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\u2019t imagine how even the camera survived. \u201cI don\u2019t know why my feed is filled with videos of the North Sea,\u201d a thousand commenters always say, \u201cbut I love it.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
I can\u2019t say exactly how the trend started (because TikTok\u2019s platform search tools are horrifically bad), but I\u2019m pretty sure most people found North Sea TikTok the same way I did. On November 27th, 2023, an account called @ukdestinations \u2014 which was for years dedicated to showing viewers unexpectedly cool things around the United Kingdom \u2014\u00a0posted a North Sea video<\/a>. It was captioned, \u201cThe last clip will truly shock you,\u201d and had on-screen text at the beginning that read, \u201cThe North Sea: the most treacherous sea in the world.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n For more on North Sea TikTok, check out <\/small>this episode<\/small><\/a> of The Vergecast<\/em>.<\/small><\/p>\n<\/div>\n 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. Even its creator was surprised by the popularity: James Cullen, one of the creators behind the @ukdestinations account, told The New York Times<\/em><\/a> <\/em>that he was \u201cquite blown back by how popular the videos became\u201d and that the audience came from all over the globe. (No one behind the account got back to me while I was working on this story.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n But the most important thing about that @ukdestinations post was the soundtrack. It begins with a beat of silence, just enough to grab your attention in a sea of TikTok noise, and then, it booms with bass. \u201cYO, HO, ALL, HANDS.\u201d For the rest of the minute, the song bellows deep and low and terrifying, singing of the seas and death and survival.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cThe music is so distressing,\u201d a commenter wrote on that original video. \u201cImagine your in the middle of the ocean at night and your hear this song out of nowhere,\u201d said another. \u201cThe song scarier than the video,\u201d said a third.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Somehow, I ended up deep in North Sea TikTok, with those videos and those YO HOs all over my For You page. Pretty soon, I started to see the same song alongside TikToks about mythical monsters, phobias, storms, and other things that cause your palms to get sweaty and your body to suddenly get very still. This 60-second clip has become the unofficial soundtrack of the scary side of TikTok.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The song is a cover of a tune called \u201cHoist The Colours,\u201d<\/a> from the forgettable 2007 flick Pirates of the Caribbean: At World\u2019s End<\/em>. Here\u2019s how it sounds in the movie:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n It\u2019s an eerie song, from an early scene in At World\u2019s End <\/em>in which a bunch of pirates (and those suspected of consorting with pirates) are to be hanged. One kid starts singing in the gallows, and soon, it seems everyone on death row is singing along. After that, something something Jack Sparrow, and the movie is off and running.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Bobby Waters had always liked this song. Waters, a musician and (circa 2020) a college student, liked to sing this kind of song. It fit his deep, booming voice perfectly. \u201cThey\u2019re very bass-anthem-y, these slow minor songs that are almost folksy, like a sea shanty.\u201d Waters had started posting on TikTok in 2020 during the pandemic lockdown and had found two niches on the app: the sea shanties like \u201cSoon May the Wellerman Come\u201d that were suddenly everywhere on TikTok, and the trend of bass singers adding a low part<\/a> to viral songs. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n Waters started dueting his favorite videos and adding a bass line, and the videos started doing well. One of his early hits was a cover<\/a> of \u2014 you guessed it! \u2014\u00a0\u201cHoist the Colours\u201d with a singer named Malinda Kathleen Reese who had become hugely popular singing sea shanties. He went viral again<\/a>, adding bass to a stairwell-sung rendition of Ariana Grande\u2019s \u201cOne Last Time.\u201d And he kept making sea shanties, and the shanties kept doing well.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n TikTok, as a platform, rewards ruthless trend-chasing. Pick a trend or a sound, jump on it, and trust the algorithm to take you far. Waters has certainly done some of that \u2014 he\u2019s in a group called The Wellermen, after all, which got a record deal in the wake of the shanty craze. But he swears he didn\u2019t set out to soundtrack the creepiest videos on the internet. It just kind of happened. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n It was mid-2022, and Waters had recently been part of a chain of duets<\/a> adding parts to another cover of \u201cHoist the Colours.\u201d He\u2019d recorded his part not just once but almost a dozen times, layering all that audio into his duet. That video did well, people loved it, and as they do, commenters started asking for a full version.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cOne morning,\u201d Waters says, \u201cI don\u2019t know why, I just woke up, and as soon as I woke up, I was like, \u2018Screw it, let\u2019s do it.\u2019\u201d He sat down at his computer and started emailing some of the other bass singers on TikTok. He eventually ended up with six other low-voiced compatriots, all of them also TikTokers. Waters arranged tracks for all seven voices \u2014 \u201cI spent a couple of weeks arranging the piece because I like to take my time with this stuff,\u201d he says, in a world where a couple of weeks is only slow in TikTok time \u2014\u00a0and sent each singer a couple of parts to sing. All seven singers recorded each of their parts a few times and uploaded them to a shared Google Drive folder. \u201cIf we had seven voices on this, and layered it,\u201d Waters says, \u201cit would sound cool, but all of them layered with a ton of choices sounds like a choir. We all couldn\u2019t sing together because we were all over the world, so we just recorded a ton of different tracks.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cI wanted the song to essentially sound like you\u2019ve got a giant ship full of mountains just rowing through treacherous seas.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Waters finished the track, tapped a couple of friends for help with some strings on the intro and some mastering experience, and pretty quickly had a finished song<\/a>. It felt big, it felt ominous, it felt powerful. \u201cI wanted the song to essentially sound like you\u2019ve got a giant ship full of mountains just rowing through treacherous seas,\u201d he says. \u201cLike if earthquakes were singing.\u201d He thought about adding a higher part to the melody but ultimately wanted to let the bass do the work. \u201cI wanted everyone to feel how much bass you can put in something,\u201d Waters says. \u201cThe bass just cuts so hard, and you feel it right in your chest. I love that feeling so much.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Waters made a music video to go along with the song on YouTube and then uploaded the track to Soundrop, a platform that distributes your music to basically every music and social platform you can think of. He even gave the group a (not terribly creative) name: the Bass Singers of TikTok. The song premiered on YouTube on September 23rd, 2022. For more than a year, it did\u2026 perfectly well. No mega-viral moments, no new record deals or late-night appearances, but it was Waters\u2019 most successful YouTube premiere yet and a strong release for a bunch of friends from TikTok. Waters wasn\u2019t even really paying attention to how the song was doing on social, anyway; he\u2019d made the TikToks, then made the full song, and the full song was what he cared about most.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Then, more than a year later, North Sea TikTok took off. There had been a few \u201cNorth Sea is scary!\u201d videos before, some even with similar crashing-wave footage, but things really got rolling around the time of that @ukdestinations video in early November. According to TikTok\u2019s data, videos with #northsea have been viewed a total of 2.9 billion times \u2014 2.2 billion of them from the beginning of November to the beginning of January. That\u2019s a 315 percent increase in views during that time. Over on #northseatiktok, TikTok has seen 109.5 million total views, 98.9 million of them in that same time period. North Sea TikTok happened big, and it happened all at once.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Vdeos with #northsea have been viewed a total of 2.9 billion times<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Waters started to notice \u201cHoist The Colours\u201d going viral in two ways: the stream numbers on YouTube, Spotify, and elsewhere started growing much faster, and he started getting texts from friends who had just mindlessly scrolled onto a creepy video and heard his booming bass underneath it. Right now, the song has just shy of 8 million views on YouTube and nearly 12 million on Spotify. (When you search \u201cHoist The Colours\u201d on Spotify, the Bass Singers\u2019 version shows up above the original.)\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Meanwhile, on TikTok, more than 197,000 videos<\/a> have been made with the same 60-second clip from \u201cHoist The Colours.\u201d It\u2019s the North Sea; it\u2019s \u201cthe scariest doll in the world\u201d; it\u2019s \u201cNASA has a megalodon\u201d; it\u2019s occasionally videos that have nothing to do with any of this but are just trying to catch the viral wave. The song is No. 5 on TikTok\u2019s Viral 50 list and No. 26 on its overall Top 50 chart. Anecdotally, North Sea TikTok is slowing down a bit at least on my For You feed, but \u201cHoist The Colours\u201d is still absolutely everywhere. It\u2019s so big that popular creators like Chris Olsen can get mad at the song<\/a> in their own videos, and people know exactly what they\u2019re talking about. There are now even parodies of the cover, which is how you know you\u2019ve really made it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Waters says he\u2019s not trying to capitalize on this or find some other corner of TikTok in need of big bass. He\u2019s got other projects, other sea shanties, other things to do. He hasn\u2019t even listened to \u201cHoist the Colours\u201d much recently. But he seems to love that the song found its perfect home on the internet. \u201cYou have these massive boats,\u201d he says, \u201cand you see these giant Krakens and whales and stuff, and if you imagine them speaking, it\u2019s not like,\u201d and here, he throws his voice smaller and up an octave, \u201c\u2018Hi, I\u2019m a whale!\u2019 You imagine something massive.\u201d Those deep waters and those deep voices make you feel something \u2014 Waters just wants everyone to feel it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Just before Waters and I hung up, I asked him, hypothetically, what might you do if you were going to ruthlessly trend chase and just try to do this over and over? He thought about it for a minute. Then, he had his really big idea. \u201cMaybe a little Merry Bass-mass next year?\u201d Watch your back, Mariah. The Bass Singers of TikTok are coming.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n