Jeansboy, Sofie Royer Austrian Dream (2025)
We humans have a deep affection for the sea. If we look back far enough along the evolutionary path, the ocean was our birthplace, the place where life first took shape. But what we’re drawn to isn’t the dark, unpredictable depths or the unforgiving open waters; it’s the sunlit shallows, the sea breeze, the pristine beaches, where the sea feels like a gentle companion, not an untamed force.
Vienna was once such a place. Around 20 million years ago, a vast sea covered much of the area, reaching as far as present-day Kazakhstan. “The climate was subtropical, similar to what you’d find in the Persian Gulf or the Bahamas,” says Mathias Harzhauser, Director of the Paleontology Department at Vienna’s Natural History Museum. “Offshore islands would have looked like today’s tropical getaways.
Vienna’s maritime past is still very much present; in fact, the city quite literally stands on sand. Beneath the grand façades of Habsburg architecture lie bricks molded from the clay of an ancient sea. Dig into the ground anywhere in Vienna and you’re likely to uncover remnants of that distant shoreline: seashells, snails, and traces of marine life that once thrived here.
In their melancholic, art-pop duet “Austrian Dream”, Jeansboy and Sofie Royer (who, frankly, deserves her own spotlight) sing, “Why isn't Vienna by the sea?” It might be a subtle lament about the forces of geology and climate that shaped the world differently—or simply a poetic expression of a longing many share. Either way, the question lingers like a daydream: tender, impossible and strangely relatable.
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