Posted by It’s already famous as the Hyundai “Viking” commercial, released in 2024 for the Santa Fe campaign: discover that amazing song and its story.
Every year, Hyundai delights us with a new commercial campaign that accompanies us for many months. Every time we watch with pleasure an ad that triggers our passion for cars, we look at the most recent Santa Fe model, and very often, the song in the background is just fire.
It happened again in 2024: the Hyundai commercial released for the new Santa Fe went immediately viral for its song and the Viking family that will conquer the weekend. The idea is simple but really effective: a family with husband, wife, and two kids enters their SUV for a short escape, and being in that car, into the wild, immediately triggers their savage side. Somehow, the idea of becoming a Viking-like individual is a good way to show our instinctual nature: that must come from the many recent TV shows set in Nordic history.
Of course, for a commercial that is supposed to stimulate your wild core, there must be a piece of energetic rock music in the background. So there it is, for the Viking character inside you: the song in the 2024 Hyundai Santa Fe commercial is Barracuda by Heart. You can listen to it in full streaming below.
Heart is one of the many iconic rock bands of the 70s, and Barracuda is one of their most famous songs. It was released in 1977 as the lead single of their album Little Queen, and it’s still considered one of the best rock songs of all time. The guitar riffs and the vocals by Ann Wilson have left an indelible mark in rock fans’ memories, which is why many recognized the song immediately after watching the commercial.
There is a peculiar story behind the song. Barracuda was born out of Ann Wilson’s rage toward their previous record label and the music business in general. The year before, they published the album Dreamboat Annie, with both sisters standing with naked shoulders on the album cover. Their label, Mushroom Records, decided to run a controversial campaign to promote the album. The publicity stunt showed the album cover with the tagline “Heart’s Wilson Sisters Confess: It Was Only Our First Time,” implying an incestuous relationship between the two biological sisters.
That triggered a lot of false gossip around the band and fueled the leaders’ anger. After a concert in Detroit, a radio promoter asked Ann Wilson, “How is your lover?” When Ann found out he was referring to her sister, she got furious: that night, she wrote the lyrics for Barracuda, attacking the music industry. The barracuda is the stereotype of the music businessman who’s ready for anything to sell more records. You can find the whole story in this fascinating article by Far Out Magazine.
Below, you have the lines you hear in the 2024 Hyundai commercial.
No right, no wrong you’re selling a song, a name
You’re lying so low into the weeds
I bet you gonna ambush me
You’d have me down, down, down on my knees
Now wouldn’t you, barracuda?
So, for the 2024 Santa Fe campaign, Hyundai released a commercial featuring an iconic rock song with an extraordinary story behind it. Barracuda never fails to amaze new and old listeners: that must be the reason behind this ad’s immediate success.
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