The Symphony Dolphin meme has reached its peak

In the last few years, TikTok has successfully taken over from X (formerly Twitter) and Reddit as the meme capital of the social media world, hurling viral memes almost every week.

The latest sensation from the China-based social media app is the Symphony Dolphin meme, first posted by user @heiratet on August 18, 2024. The meme entailed an image of a dolphin jumping out of water, accompanied by Swedish pop star Zara Larsson’s song “Symphony” and text that read “I’m depressed.” Little did the user know that the meme format would take over the internet in the next few days, with the original TikTok garnering more than a million views.

Other users have borrowed the format, running with the same image and choice of music, albeit with different melancholic messages. The meme that has been viewed the most so far has the text “i love alcohol” on it, and Larsson also got in on the act recently, sharing a TikTok with the text “What the Fuck is Happening” on August 21. The singer-songwriter clearly knows her audience well, as she incorporated the visuals of the viral meme at one of her shows.

It is important to note that while the demotivational messages are the key recipe in the meme format going viral, the song and the image make it a hilarious cocktail. The format closely resembles the “How I see the World after X” template from 2022, which originated on Instagram. The meme had an Adobe rainbow image macro with the caption reading, “How i see the world after i eat a big sandwich.”

The most commonly featured artwork in the Symphony Dolphin memes is a painting by Christian Riese Lassen titled “Enjoy Sunshine.” On his website, the work is described as a “blend of real and the imaginary,” which only adds to the comedic factor of the meme. The song, meanwhile, was a major hit during the year of its release (2017) and now has newfound popularity thanks to TikTok. The track is a collaboration between Larsson and classical crossover band Clean Bandit, as a part of both artists’ sophomore albums.