There seems to be a severe lack of information on the WSQKsync here on Tumblr, so I decided to make an effort to fill that gap.
For the uninitiated, WSQKsync is the idea that the official radio station that played during season 5 of Stranger Things (WSQK) aligns with what happens within the show and “syncs”.
The discovery of the sync began with @disastertourwaterdeepedition, who found that if you played the radio at the same time as the finale, a rickroll played when they fought Vecna and the Mindflayer.
After seeing this and looking into it further, @pjofan1912 found the entire finale synced, and @pass2thelibrary proceeded to successfully sync the entirety of season 5. Since then we’ve expanded to past seasons as well, which I’ll explain later in this post.
WSQKsync has been a huge collaborative effort to dig into this material, and frankly a feat of fandom cooperation. I hope you’ll join us along the ride!
Highlights masterlist
Why this is plausible:
“Dark Side of the Rainbow” is a known phenomenon where, if you press play on Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon when the lion roars before The Wizard of Oz, it lines up with what happens on screen. There’s numerous references to both The Wizard of Oz and Pink Floyd in season 5 and the documentary. Here’s a great breakdown of these mentions by @atsadi.
It isn’t far fetched to think they could have intentionally engineered a similar effect through the radio broadcast for season 5. The Duffers said that music would play a huge role this season, but where was it? There’s a severe lack of music in the show itself, especially volumes 2 & 3. Until you consider what was played on the radio.
How it works:
First, you need access to the WSQK archive (alt link). The most important aspect of syncing is anchoring the times of the radio broadcast to when each volume aired. Because it was based in the UK, this is adjusted for time zones.
Volume I is 1AM (GMT) Nov. 27th
Volume II is 1AM (GMT) Dec. 26th
Volume III is 1AM (GMT) Jan. 1st
For each of these, you want to start the broadcast an hour into “The Late Night Crew With Vance Goodman” and when applicable transition into the start of “Mindy’s Early Risers on WSQK”.
You have to account for load times between episodes for the first 2 volumes, and can use your judgement for the exact second you think aligns best, but @rockmerobin synced it mathematically in a way that’s easy to replicate on your own if you wish—just let the radio keep playing for 33 seconds after the “next” button pops up, then hit play on the next episode! This is called the 333sync. CLARIFYING EDIT: The 33 added seconds are just for v1. For v2, they didn’t add 33 seconds, just synced it to when the next button appeared without the added time.
It helps a lot to try to line up sound effects with actions or events on screen, and it becomes pretty obvious when you’ve got the right timing as things start falling into place.
If you think you’ve got a grasp on this, however, we can take it even further…
The concept of “sides”:
Time to think of each episode as building blocks, and the volumes as foundations for those blocks. If you go backward (or forward) from the anchor points of each volume, you can in fact align key moments from any season to songs that were playing on the radio in the hours prior to volumes 1, 2 and 3.
Side A is anchored to the start time of Volume I (1AM GMT on Nov. 27th)
Side B is anchored to the start time of Volume II (1AM GMT on Dec. 26th)
Side C is anchored to the start time of Volume III (1AM GMT on Jan. 1st)
In other words: Be Kind, Rewind! Act as if you had the whole show playing (… for a couple days nonstop) in the time leading up to each season 5 release, alongside the radio broadcast. Doing this, 3 possible syncs, or sides, are currently being explored. Here’s a graphic by @pass2thelibrary to help visualize how this works.
Sides A and B require some space between each episode to align, while side C stacks without any extra time whatsoever. You can go all the way back to S1E01 with this method! We’re working on having timestamps for all the sides available for people to try themselves, but it isn’t complete yet. The entirety of side C is available to explore below.
See for yourself:
These creators have been kind enough to presync their versions & let me share them with you. Thank you to Ioun and Pen for your hard work and dedication to this project! Your efforts are greatly appreciated 🫶🏻
Side C by @pass2thelibrary
333sync (combined sides a, b & c) by @rockmerobin
More to come:
It’s hard to say with certainty the exact meaning of each sync, but once you watch one for yourself it’s plain to see there’s a ton of evidence for intentionality. Once you consider it intentional, it adds so much hidden meaning to the show.
There’s several projects in the works from sync enthusiasts like myself—nailing down and compiling the most solid timestamps, experimenting with new methodologies or anchor points, and just generally having fun exploring the show in a new light alongside a massive new soundtrack. I plan to post more in depth explanations of individual syncs, share compilations of my favorite moments from them, and keep an eye on new discoveries to share with you all. Play around, enjoy yourself, explore!
We’re also undertaking the task of transcribing the entire WSQK broadcast, which is going to take a lot of dedication and manpower. If this interests you at all, check it out here.
If you have any questions about the sync, feel free to send them here and I’ll do my best to answer 🫶🏻
the tortured poet’s department syncs perfectly with the stranger things finale
i realize how crazy and far fetched this sounds, but i beg you to hear me out. this sync has made it impossible for me to ignore the stranger things-taylor tether, so i’d like to walk you all through how i got here.
i understand it’s hard to believe in the involvement of outside artists, and i also understand that a lot of people don’t like taylor as a person or a musician. if any of that if the case for you and i’d appreciate if you please don’t interact with this theory! we’re all just here to have a good time 🫶🏻
that said! the first thing i want to present to you are the lyrics that play over the opening credits, when the screen says ‘STRANGER THINGS 5’, because that’s what i can’t get out of my head as i’m investigating this sync.
You're in self-sabotage mode, throwing spikes down on the road
But I've seen this episode and still loved the show
Who else decodes you?
self sabotage, like making a fake ending? spikes on the road like when they’re caught by the military at the end of the episode? she mentions an episode of a show as the title card is on the screen? and finally, we are literally decoding the entire show right now! there are actually sister lyrics that bookend these with the closing credits, but you’ll have to read more to see those:)
the last thing i’ll give you before i make you dig under the cut is my favorite sync of the episode. i implore you to watch it, and if it compels you, to look below for more of my thought processes, clips & a link to the full sync for you to check out yourself!
my curiosity about the taylor thether began when i first watched the music video for opalite. there is stranger things/lwg imagery all over the video. here’s the rudimentary collage i made for a friend when the video first dropped:
here’s a post by @nanas-basement with more polished visual parallels! there’s also a series of tiktoks by @overwhelmedbutok (one, two, three) that do the same. there are easter eggs and st related imagery in numerous other videos of hers as well that i may cover later.
there’s also several posts on twitter by stranger writers mentioning taylor (one, two, three, four) so her work hasn’t been unmentioned by them, either.
now, the tortured poets department—her eleventh album—is not the album opalite is on. however, a fun fact about the album is that it was announced as a normal length album, and that first half leaked on april 18th, the day before it was actually set to release. it also coincidentally seems to be the day TF85 is scheduled to release in theaters. then, two hours after the official album release, an entire second album’s worth of music dropped with no notice.
a double album. fans had been speculating and theorizing about taylor doing this for a while now, but the concept had always been called crazy or debunked, even by other fans. having everything leak a day early solidified the surprise—how could you possibly keep a secret that big under wraps?
starting to sound familiar?
while researching for this post, i found a variety article with incredibly coded language. i screenshotted an example of this below.
stuff like time, puzzles, moving pieces around a table, clues and solvable mysteries. since variety has had a hand in the stranger things side of things, i don’t think it’s implausible they could be part of it with taylor as well.
that article mentioned the foreword for the album, which i recommend you read in full, but the most relevant lines to me were these:
pendulum, like a clock. chaos… like dustin’s speech about chaos classes in dnd? the caged beast could be tharizdun which is one of my favorite lwg theories, who is referred to as “the chained god”! and curious things is just stranger things reworded.
the reason i was compelled to check out the sync in the first place was because when i was casually listening to it for fun, i started to notice stranger things buzzwords or phrases appearing in just about every song. it was meant to be a fun novelty just for me, to see if there were any uncanny happy accidents that fell over the right lyrics. here’s another messy collage of some of the lyrics that stood out to me.
they don’t all fall on the moments they’re referencing. the typewriter, for example, is mentioned at the beginning of the album rather than the end. however, many of them are. and of course the entire album syncs regardless.
on the topic of things mentioned in the lyrics, i’d like to draw your attention to the lyrics that bookend the ones i mentioned play during the opening credits. these play over the closing credits with the illustrations.
like… this screams lovewinsgate. honestly, most of these are self explanatory, but LOOKING BACKWARDS MIGHT BE THE ONLY WAY TO MOVE FORWARD? ahem, apologies for the caps. but that’s just a crazy coincidence to me.
and that’s not even starting on the snowball tether. if you look backwards to the snowball in stranger things, where they are slow dancing, and sparks mean romantic electricity… the score for that scene is “every breath you take”, from the police’s album, synchronicity.
i might make a whole separate post for that, because the 3 colors from the cover of that are constantly appearing throughout the seasons—but for right now all you need to know is that that’s what’s playing at the snow ball, it’s incredibly foundational to the show’s story, and taylor mentions it here. (also worth noting that mike’s tear right before the epilogue does in fact sync shockingly well to ttpd. “how did it end?” ends right as it cuts to black)
i’m not sure exactly how to close my thoughts here, because they’re still developing and i will likely post an update to this in the coming weeks. but i wanted to get the information out as soon as i could, so this is what i’ve got for you guys at the moment.
i guess i’ll say that this sync has been my favorite thing to discover so far in my lovewinsgate journey, and it has truly allowed me to have a new appreciation for both the album and the finale. i actually find the finale enjoyable when it’s synced to TTPD!
so this is my attempt at sharing that enjoyment with you all. here’s some clips of my favorite syncs for you to check out:
Opening credits
El in tank & Byler tower
Hopper Vecna vision
Kali’s death
Mindflayer death & Holly rescue
M11 void scene
Bench talk & graduation
El’s escape
Binder shelving & credits
and here’s the full sync, which i highly recommend watching yourself 🫶🏻
So I started looking at WSQKsync mainly with regards to the finale, but now I've been looking a bit into the other syncs of season 5 and I'm not sure if this has been discussed before but:
I feel like flickering lights repeatedly line up with the WSQK (the sorcerer scene being the most famous example). I randomly looked through the first volume (Side A sync) to find scenes with flickering lights, and for all of them they at least somewhat match the rythm (offset could be explained by small syncing mistakes, and sometimes it's difficult to hear/see when there's a lot of action going on).
The ones I've looked at:
The attack on the Wheelers' house
The attack on the barn
Max waking up in Henry's memories
Hopper and El in the UD military base
It could just be easter eggs and/or serve to anchor the WSQKsync, but it made me think back to how Joyce communicating through the lights with Will is, like, at the very core of Stranger Things, and how that theme was even picked up in season 4 again. So, is Mike communicating through the lights/music with us? As in, could it serve as some sort of code? Idk
Also, iirc, in the documentary they talk about how there was an entire science to making the lights flicker in the 'right way' or something (arguing it had to be random but not overwhelming to watch or sth?). So we know they spent a lot of time thinking about how the lights should flicker.
I would be interested to hear what others think/if this has been considered already? :)
hey, awesome observation, this is exactly the sort of thing i made this blog for!!
i don’t think i noticed this myself or have seen others mention it before so i think you caught something new:) i’ll keep an eye out as i go through side C (which i will start posting highlights of shortly!)
it definitely sounds like we should keep an eye on the lights 👀
how did you come up with the 33 seconds between episodes for syncing? is it hinted at somewhere in WSQK?
Hey! It’s based on the DnD-inspired theory that Tharizdun is the big bad behind what’s going on —I asked @rockmerobin to explain their methodology, and here’s what they said:
Tharizdun Holy number: 333
Season 5 episodes 1, 2, 3 all got 3 minutes of time added days after their original drop. This is 3 episodes with 3 additional minutes.
For my sync, I was curious if the number 333 could be relevant so for the gap between episodes 1-2, 2-3, & 3-4 where the 3 added minutes would have affected your viewing experience (between episodes), I added 33 seconds to get a total after drop additional time of 3:33.
3 episodes with 3 minutes and 33 seconds added. This also gets 12 total and with the clock stuff it felt right.
So I do need to amend that I mischaracterized the sync in my initial post and the 33 seconds are only added to volume 1, and volume 2 syncs at the next button with no added seconds. Sorry about that! But hopefully Ioun’s answer cleared up your question :)
Where did you get the WSQK recordings from? I am either stupid or it's not available in my country
The radio archive is “livinghuman.host” (unsure the origin of this domain, but it’s what was shared with me by those who found the sync), and the alt link is the Internet Archive.
As for the presynced links, 333sync is a Mega link, and Side C is Dropbox.
I’m not sure what countries these things are available in, I’m sorry they’re not working for you! Perhaps you could try a VPN?
