A debut album is usually a band figuring out who they are in public. This one arrived with the answer already written: bright synth-pop on the surface, a streak of melancholy running underneath, and a singer with a range that turned ordinary pop songs into something steeper. Most of the world knows the record for one track. That is both fair and a shame, because the album around it holds up better than its single-song reputation lets on.

It was the start of a long career that the US charts would never quite capture, the record that made a-ha famous in America and a permanent fixture nearly everywhere else. The hooks are immediate. The mood, if you sit with it, is not as sunny as the production. For a first record, it is remarkably sure of what it wants to be.