Welcome to Sleeper Hit Support Group, a column diving into the song currently occupying the bottom spot of the Billboard Hot 100.

In a pop landscape that asks more questions that it answers, I'm setting out to answer three questions about each of these songs: how it got here, if the song is good, and where it's going. In this 100th spot we'll find unlikely ascents, falls from grace, and resurgences of hits from bygone eras.

Today, we're taking a look at the unlikely TikTok hit, "Jane!" by The Long Faces.

How did it get here?

The emergence of "Jane!" seems to have been entirely a fluke. The Long Faces disbanded three years ago, and only had seven songs to their name to begin with. They were a London-based quintet that released their debut single "Cadence" in 2017. They went on to release six more songs between then and 2023, and it seems they disbanded after continued underperformance. They never got signed and there's no record of them ever touring.

The only semblance of a bio I could find about this band is from a 2020 press release for their three-song EP released that summer:

"The Long Faces first developed a love of unusual rock music whilst at school in Canterbury, soaking up the city’s heritage of progressive rock, along with contemporary jazz, ‘60s psychedelia and choral music. 'There’s something wistfully provincial in a lot of the Kentish music from that particular time,' explain the band. 'There are some great examples of this in the early demo tapes of The Wilde Flowers, who moved on to bigger things in the shape of Soft Machine, but left behind a blueprint for melodic purity and harmonic surprise—not totally dissimilar from the way we approach our own songwriting.'"

The Long Faces' lead singer Tom Lane has since joined the art rock band Ugly (UK), which at one point included Black Country, New Road drummer Charlie Wayne.

That's it. That's quite literally all I could find on this band. Their social media channels have largely been scrubbed, and they don't have a single interview to their name. So how did this eight-year-old song find its way onto the Hot 100? TikTok, of course. That's the answer to every question at this point. To get more specific, a fan edit of the video game Dispatch using "Jane!" went viral on the platform.

Now, the song is also being adopted by fans of the anime series Jujutsu Kaisen, with video edits branding character Ryu Ishigori as “Jane Juliet,” thanks to their use of both the Long Faces song and L.A. band Clarion’s “Hello Juliet.”

This virility allowed for the track to debut on the chart a couple weeks ago at #74, and has fallen to the bottom of the chart in the two tracking weeks since.

Anyways…

Is the song any good?

Is it cool that a defunct British alt-rock band with absolutely zero public-facing presence has a song on the Hot 100? Sure. Do I actually like the song? No, not really.

A vast majority of that take comes from my personal tastes and biases. Tom Lane's voice is a grating combination of Damon Albarn and Alex Turner, the frontmen of two bands I’ve never really clicked with. I hate that chorus-heavy guitar tone too. With that said, it makes complete sense that this song found its way to TikTok. It evokes the vague mystique of rock music without having to do anything all that interesting. It's why all the tracks from Arctic Monkeys' AM have done so well on the platform retroactively.

The song itself is allegedly based on the serial killer Jane Toppan, who murdered 12 people to service her own sexual fetish. Aside from Toppan being quite niche among famed serial killers, that story isn't all that well communicated in the song. The most expansive collection of information on The Long Faces is their subreddit (which is sparse in its own right), and one in every three posts is an inquiry into what "Jane!" is actually about. Many people respond to these posts, but only few are correct.

Where is it going?

I'm sure the members of The Long Faces have been having some weird conversations these last couple weeks. The collaborative Instagram post with Billboard congratulating them on their chart entry is the first activity on their account in three years. Will the seemingly random success of their eight-year-old song incite a reunion? I doubt it. I would hope these people have enough going on in their lives that a fleeting viral moment wouldn't pull them away from their current paths. Perhaps that royalty check will buy them a nice dinner or cover a month of rent.

It's near certain we will never hear from The Long Faces again, but they got the musician's equivalent of finding $40 in your coat pocket, and that's gotta feel pretty nice.