About

Little Dark Age is a song by American band MGMT that later surged in popularity in late 2020 after being sampled in a series of TikTok videos.

Origin

"Little Dark Age" was released by MGMT on October 17th, 2017 as the title song of their fourth album, Little Dark Age. The accompanying music video, uploaded^[1] to YouTube on the same day, has garnered over 35 million views (shown below). Other videos on YouTube with audio only^[2][3] have accumulated more than 30 million views while the song has upwards of 120 million plays^[4] on Spotify.

Spread

On September 2nd, 2020, TikTok user anti.audios uploaded^[5] a TikTok featuring a slowed version of Little Dark Age (shown below). It was inspired by an earlier video^[6] posted in July by hudsoncosplay. The sound from anti.audios' TikTok has been used in over 200,000 videos as of April 1st, 2020.^[7] According to Google Trends, the song suddenly gained interest in the week of October 4th, 2020 before peaking in the week of November 15th.

Time Warp Scans

Some of the TikToks featuring "Little Dark Age" include the Time Warp Scan filter,^[8] utilizing the filter to create dark images, such as Baphomet (compilation shown below, left). Other videos utilize the song in recreations^[9] of old paintings (compilation shown below, right).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References