a-ha

a-ha are three Norwegians who got famous in America for about thirty seconds and then spent the next forty years being quietly enormous everywhere else. That gap is the whole story of the band. To a lot of US listeners they are a single song and a single video, a freeze-frame from 1985. Across Europe, South America, and back home in Norway, they are a stadium act with a catalogue, a band people grew up with and never stopped buying tickets to see.

They formed in Oslo and broke through with a debut that the wider world mostly remembers for one track, though the record has more going on than its reputation suggests. At the front is Morten Harket, who sings like the rules about range do not apply to him. Behind him are Magne Furuholmen and Pål Waaktaar, the two who actually built the songs, the keyboard parts and the writing that the voice sits on top of.

The synth-pop label stuck early and never fully came off, which does the band a slight disservice. The hooks are bright and the surfaces are glossy, but there is melancholy underneath almost everything they make. They were always a little sadder than they sounded.