a-ha - The cold warmth of the fjords

a-ha's recording career begins against the backdrop of the Norwegian fjords, when in the summer of 1980 the two very young Paal Waaktaar (then not quite nineteen) and Magne Furuholmen (still a minor) released, with the band Bridges, the album Fakkeltog (A Torch-light Procession) alongside Viggo Bondi and Øystein Jevanord. Despite being the debut of a band made up of fledgling musicians, the album reveals an unexpected compositional maturity and remarkable instrumental skill. Fakkeltog is the fruit of the authors' boundless admiration for the Doors, quoted and echoed throughout the record. Even Waaktaar's vocal delivery strains to imitate Morrison's, and tracks like "Somebody's Going Away" genuinely sound like unreleased tracks by the legendary band pulled out of a drawer.

Bridges even ambitiously set out to take on the Californian band's "long" songs: the urge to measure themselves against the ten-plus minutes of "When The Music's Over" materializes in the equally extended track "The Stranger's Town" (which opens with the "rain" effect of "Riders On The Storm"!). The result is on the whole convincing, not least because, despite the obvious references, Bridges arrive at a personal interpretation of their idols' music, showing no shortage of original traits. On closer listening, Fakkeltog actually reveals itself to be something more than a merely technically admirable imitation of the famous American band, betraying influences of progressive rock ("Scared Bewildered Wild") or offering sudden pop-flavored openings ("The Vacant").

What's more, heard with the benefit of hindsight, the record now comes across as an incubator of ideas for a-ha's future output: the chorus of "May The Last Dance Be Mine" and some lines from "Every Mortal Night" would later resurface in "This Alone Is Love", while the guitar passages of "Pavillion Of The Luxuriant Trees" closely recall those of Analogue, recorded a full twenty-five years later.

Even so, the album's melodies don't make for easy listening, and little in it hints at the sudden "commercial" turn a-ha would soon take. American music would nonetheless remain a constant source of inspiration for Paal Waaktaar throughout his entire career, unmistakably shaping a good deal of his future output as well.

The Bridges experience wouldn't last long. Waaktaar and Furuholmen want to leave Norway and reach London, and success (the theme of fleeing one's homeland would become a recurring one in a-ha's songs). Bridges' second, self-titled album (by then renamed Poem) would never be released, and in 1982 the band broke up. The two nonetheless manage to convince promising singer Morten Harket to join them, and the trio sets off for London for good to try their luck.

And luck they do find (though not without some early struggle), so much so that the newly formed a-ha manage to sign a contract with one of the world's biggest major labels, Warner Bros.

a-ha's first single would also turn out to be their biggest commercial hit: the now-universally-known "Take On Me". Yet the single's launch was anything but easy. Recorded in 1984, the track went completely unnoticed by both media and public, but not by Warner Bros executives, who kept believing in its potential. In the end Warner decided to entrust Steve Barron, one of the greatest video directors of all time, with making a new promotional clip for the song. Barron was given free rein, on the sole condition that he produce something astonishing.

Things went just as Warner had hoped: the animated video for "Take On Me" immediately proved to be a massive success, capable of establishing the band worldwide. The debut single climbed the charts across the globe, reaching number 1 in many countries, including the United States. Barron's video is still ranked today among the best and most celebrated of all time, a genuine classic in the history of music video.

It sounds fairly paradoxical that music videos represented, at one and the same time, both the main reason for the trio's success and the main reason for their failure. Propelled by the clip and single of "Take On Me", a-ha's debut album Hunting High And Low achieved great sales success, but as early as their second video the band began running into censorship issues: the video for "The Sun Always Shines On TV", again directed by Barron, was not well received in the US – an episode that certainly did nothing to help a-ha's breakthrough overseas, so much so that after the triumphant debut of "Take On Me" the band's presence on the American charts would afterward be entirely negligible. On the other hand, "The Sun Always Shines On Tv", as well as the remix of "Hunting High And Low" (meanwhile "Train Of Thought" was also released), reached the top of the British charts.

Among young girls all across Europe, "a-ha-mania" had by then well and truly broken out. More than the band's musical qualities, the main reason behind that segment of the audience's interest was the good looks of singer Morten Harket. At the height of the commercial explosion of teenage-oriented bands, a-ha found themselves competing head-to-head with Duran Duran and Wham!, with Morten Harket cast as the direct rival of Simon Le Bon and George Michael in the hearts of young record and merchandise buyers. This boy-band image would unfortunately remain stitched to the group for life, to the point of almost entirely eclipsing their genuine artistic talent – above all in Southern European countries. Indeed, such enormous commercial success with the general public was not matched by adequate critical consideration, with critics soon largely ignoring the band's output in the years to come. And yet the album Hunting High And Low actually offers plenty to be interested in. "Take On Me" and "The Sun Always Shines On Tv" are notable essentially because they are songs of huge mass appeal built with pinpoint precision, enriched by captivating details such as Magne's famous keyboard riffs and Morten Harket's vocal virtuosity.

But the most artistically interesting tracks are rather those in which a-ha excel at a distinctly Nordic kind of epic grandeur, achieved through a skillful use of post-new wave electronics. The aforementioned "Train Of Thought" is an electronic track once again introduced by a catchy riff (an essential element for a-ha at the time) but this time played on pan flute (!). The song's lyrics, dreamlike and surreal, are deeply evocative. The sumptuous, poignant title track is by now one of the band's classic melodies. "Living A Boy's Adventure Tale" picks up the lyricism and epic atmospheres of the album's title track in a more electronic and, at the same time, symphonic register, with moods that would also resurface in the closing track "Here I Stand And Face The Rain".

Other compositions still sound enigmatic and seductive today, like the mysterious "I Dream Myself Alive". It's worth noting, too, how even the lyrics of the seemingly upbeat and immediate "Take On Me" already reveal that sense of flight, abandonment and loss that would become one of the defining traits of a-ha's output ("I'll be gone in a day or twoooo…").

The follow-up Scoundrel Days, released in 1986, is today considered the quintessential a-ha "classic" album. The record is indeed made up of ten nearly flawless tracks that flow seamlessly from start to finish. The original vinyl and cassette edition has the merit of clearly highlighting the division of the material into two fairly distinct halves: side A is lush, symphonic, sustained at a level of high emotional tension, while side B is overall lighter and more immediate. The title track, despite never having been released as a single, has always been one of the fans' favourite songs, performed at every a-ha concert. It opens with a hammering keyboard pulse that drives verses whose chilling lines are delivered by Morten with cynical bitterness. The harshness of the verses, which express an oppressive sense of anguish through rather cryptic lines, alternates with the contrasting airiness of the chorus, which instead betrays an irrepressible yearning for hope and love. The emotional tension and the jarring contrast are sustained throughout the track right up to the last note, screamed by Morten in pain against the void. The title track is followed by "The Swing Of Things", another song that shares with it the distinction of having become a classic of their live repertoire without ever being released as a single. Various versions of the track exist, released in different contexts, testifying to its importance for the band members themselves (ranging from the icy new wave of the demo versions to the majesty of the 2002 live version How Can I Sleep With Your Voice In My Head).

The album maintains a very high standard in the songs that follow too: the drama and symphonic grandeur that already distinguish the first two songs explode in "I've Been Losing You" and "Manhattan Skyline". "I've Been Losing You" is by far the track with the greatest symphonic impact, marked by a masterful use of brass and percussion, while "Manhattan Skyline" alternates the melodic sweetness of the verses with the aggressive, violent "electro-metal" style of the chorus. The tension is only eased in the intimate, reflective interlude of the dreamy "October".

Side B is lighter overall, but it's a lightness that is never trivial, recalling the deceptive simplicity of the Beatles. "Cry Wolf" is a fine example of synth-pop with a nod to dance music, built around an improbable imitation of nighttime howls. Even the deliberately more immediate tracks like "We're Looking For The Whales" or "Maybe Maybe" come across as small gems of fresh elegance. Other tracks, such as "The Weight Of The Wind" and "Soft Rains Of April", partly revisit the epic tone of side A, as if to give the record an underlying continuity.

In 2010, Hunting High And Low and Scoundrel Days were digitally remastered by Bill Inglot and Dan Hersch and reissued by Rhino Entertainment, the prestigious label affiliated with Warner Music specialising in reissues and anthologies, enriched with an impressive wealth of extra tracks.

The happy result achieved with Scoundrel Days could hardly be matched easily in the short term, all the more so given the head-on clash that had emerged between the band's genuine artistic talent and the major label's desire to preserve their commercial success (a situation cynically described years later in the song "The Company Man"). It should therefore come as no surprise that the follow-up, Stay On These Roads, delivers a more uneven result, although commercially the album represented the band's last真正 major mainstream success before their reunion at the dawn of the new millennium.

a-ha never intended to make two similar records throughout their entire career, and Stay On These Roads is no exception to that rule. The sounds employed are sparser compared to previous albums, creating a distinctly "synthetic" feel (the use of synthesizers is very pronounced). But what characterises the album most is precisely the dichotomy between free artistic expression and pressing commercial demands. This dichotomy weighs heavily even within individual songs taken on their own: in "Hurry Home", the vaguely enigmatic, medieval-tinged grandeur of the verses clashes with the frivolous immediacy of a chorus that tries, rather presumptuously, to be catchy; "The Living Daylights" (from the soundtrack of the James Bond film of the same name) alternates interesting melodic passages with overly immediate, blandly catchy stadium-style choruses. a-ha then hit rock bottom with "Touchy" and "You Are The One", clumsy attempts to replicate the commercial impact of "Take On Me".

On the plus side, the album does contain some successful compositions, such as the exquisitely "synthetic" and artificial-sounding "The Blood That Moves The Body", the poignant "This Alone Is Love" and the melodramatic "Out Of Blue Comes Green", entrusted to Morten Harket's vocal virtuosity and its powerful emotional charge.

The Nineties open under the best auspices with East Of The Sun, West Of The Moon. a-ha don't seem to have taken the turn of the decade as a mere matter of calendar convention, and the album reveals a drastic change of direction. All in all, the band sensed well the shift underway in the musical landscape and showed remarkable reflexes in recognising that the electronic Eighties were over - and that it was time to open up to the more distinctly rock-oriented sounds coming from across the Atlantic (the following year would see the explosion of the Nirvana phenomenon, and shortly after that the Smashing Pumpkins would emerge).

It's true that, for anyone who remembers the Bridges experience, this change of direction also sounds like a return to their roots. "East Of The Sun, West Of The Moon" is in fact strongly influenced by American music, but this time more by folk, jazz and the imagery of singer-songwriter tradition. The friendship with the Everly Brothers provides a notable starting point for the cover of "Crying In The Rain", written by Carole King, which opens the record.

The overall result is genuinely remarkable: here the trio give us some of their finest tracks. Take, for example, "Early Morning", a song with a direct, perfectly calibrated melody, or "Slender Frame", an emblematic song on the classic a-ha theme of escape, the title track with its incisive, lush orchestration, and "Sycamore Leaves" (whose opening picks up on and elevates the incipit of the Doors' "Backdoor Man"), marked by a dizzying, dazzling keyboard crescendo.

Another touch of pure grace comes with "Waiting For Her". The album then closes with a true gem, one that foreshadows the new stylistic path Waaktaar would pursue in his constant search for expressive essentiality: "(Seemingly) Non Stop July", a song about loss and the passing of time that couldn't be more balanced and complete in its stripped-down melodic purity.

In 1991, a-ha managed to set an extremely important world record: 198,000 paying spectators flocked to their performance at the Rock in Rio festival. This event of exceptional significance was almost entirely ignored by the international press, a fact that stirred no small amount of resentment in Waaktaar.

The "American phase" inaugurated by East Of The Sun, West Of The Moon is in some ways continued but ultimately surpassed on 1993's Memorial Beach. The few critics who listened to it at the time, faced with an evident musical progress that had taken the band light years away from any suspicion of easy commercial appeal, merely noted a certain affinity with the music of U2 (at times genuinely overbearing, as on "Angel in the Snow"). In reality, this is a reductive assessment, since the album draws on a wide range of influences that blend happily into an original style.

After the forgettable opening of "Dark Is the Night for All" (which starts off almost like U2's "Where the Streets Have No Name" before once again trying to edge closer to "Take On Me"), the album scores plenty of hits. The Doors-like influences return in the keyboards of "Move To Memphis", a track in which Waaktaar's escape towards American music is explicitly declared (and which had already appeared, albeit with a different mix, on the band's first official anthology, released in 1991, Headlines and Deadlines); funk magically surfaces in the guitars of the instrumental coda of "Cold As Stone"; "Lamb To The Slaughter" opens like a beat track, the chorus of "Locust" has a soul flavour, and "Memorial Beach" ventures into jazz territory. But anyone who, on the basis of these premises, expects a "warm" album will have to think again.

This is in fact a record in which the warmth of Black American music is chilled by a sense of gloom that spreads across the whole work. As the splendid cover photograph by Just Loomis makes clear, this is a deeply nocturnal album. There's no better way to capture the essence of this record than with a play on words: an album where "black" music becomes "dark" music. One could even venture a comparison, in certain respects, with David Bowie's "Station To Station" or "Low" (which, incidentally, were also an inspiration for the early-Nineties U2), in which the warmth of soul and R&B music is chilled by an electronic imprint of Teutonic origin.

If the tracks on East Of The Sun, West Of The Moon retain a certain immediacy, on Memorial Beach the band is after pinpoint perfection. The complexity of the sonic tapestry that emerges in songs like the already-mentioned "Cold As Stone" or "How Sweet It Was" is impressive. Harket's voice is now anguished and bleak, perfectly in line with the album's sound.

The record closes with one of the finest a-ha songs ever written. The title track is a simply perfect melody, performed masterfully by a Morten Harket who now goes searching for the lowest notes rather than the highest ones. Boyband, indeed: the comparison that immediately comes to mind is with the mournful Nick Cave of "The Sorrowful Wife".

Despite the high quality of the material, sales of Memorial Beach disappoint (the video for the lead single, "Dark Is The Night", is once again censored by MTV, which deems it disturbing), leading the band to split up for many years.

However, during the seven years separating Memorial Beach from the first reunion album, none of the members of a-ha sit idle. Morten Harket releases three solo albums (Poetenes Evangelium, Wild Seed and Vogts Villa), two of them in Norwegian. While on the first he performs songs by poets of his homeland, the following records reveal, surprisingly, the unexpected compositional talent of a Morten Harket who had always been relegated to a secondary role as a songwriter within the band. Several tracks stand out for their stylistic sturdiness (from "Half In Love And Half In Hate" to "Broadsky Tune", via "Himmelske Danser", to name but a few). Morten's voice often reaches levels of great drama and anguish. The playful delivery of "Take On Me", however technically flawless, now feels like a distant memory. Also particularly successful is the cover of "Ready To Go Home", written and originally performed by 10cc. Adding considerable value is also the intelligent production of Kjetil Bjerkestrand, capable of bringing any sonic idea to perfection and always ready to add mystery, emotion, charm and elegance to every track.

Strangely, the production work of Paal Waaktaar, the group's most prolific songwriter, doesn't always come across as fully satisfying. After forming Savoy with his wife Lauren Savoy and with Frode Unneland, he records no fewer than four albums (Mary Is Coming, Lackluster Me, Mountains Of Time, Reasons To Stay Indoors) of uneven quality. Worth noting, though, is the group's drastic stylistic shift compared to the sound that defines a-ha. That this is by no means a clone of the more famous band is clear from the very first record, with its unexpected openings toward sounds closer to rock than anything heard before in any of the other projects ("Daylight's Wasting", "Foolish" - rather interesting tracks - or again "Get Up Now"). Incidentally, the influence exerted by his American wife (!) on Waaktaar's style will be more than evident throughout Savoy's entire output. The following Lackluster Me opens quite convincingly, only to lose its way in the second half. Reasons To Stay Indoors contains a few gems (including the melancholy title track) but also some less striking songs.

The most successful album overall is Mountains Of Time, on which the pursuit of simplicity and immediacy leads Waaktaar to become, in certain respects, one of the finest Lennon impersonators around ("See What Becomes", "Everyone" and above all "Tongue Tied"). The stylistic results achieved on tracks such as "The End Of The Line", with its gentle orchestration, or "Bottomless Pit", a small folk masterpiece (titles that express Paal's pessimism and his constant leaning toward depression), are decidedly noteworthy.

Of the three members, Magne Furuholmen is the one who will pursue experimentation the furthest, forming Timbersound, a group specializing in soundtrack production, alongside Bjerkestrand and with the collaboration of Freddie Walden. The first album recorded is Ti Kniver I Hjertet (Ten Knives In The Heart), on which the group, searching for a style of its own, plunders far and wide from various sources of inspiration (even going so far as to cover Celentano's "Il ragazzo della Via Gluck"). But it's on Hotel Oslo that Timbersound manage to produce instrumental and vocal tracks of considerable worth - such as, to name but a few, "Con Sordino", "In The Hands Of Fools", "A Room For Thought", "We'll Never Speak Again", "Freddie's Hymn: Ismael - Sea Of Blood". Worth appreciating, besides the skillful use of instrumentation and melody, is also Bjerkestrand's excellent production, always marked by crystal-clear sound, and Walden's voice, at once soothing and sorrowful, joined on "We'll Never Speak Again" by Anneli Marian Drecker of Bel Canto (another essential group on the Norwegian music scene).

The following Hermetic is, as the title openly states, an experimental and cryptic album, made up mainly of sound and vocal experiments, yet still finding room for a sublime piano composition ("Solve Et Coagula 10"), whose distant sound seems to emerge quietly from silence and return into it (it is, in effect, a genuine composition for "piano and silence").

Magne eventually records a new soundtrack under his own name, Dragonfly: about twenty minutes of instrumental and experimental music (with the sole exception of the folk-flavored vocal title track) that reaches its stylistic peak in the even more sublime piano piece "Swimming In Silence", the perfect fulfillment of the compositional idea behind "Solve Et Coagula 10": the piano keys, barely touched, produce notes that seem to arise out of nothing and spread through a dark, dense mass of water.

The occasion for an official a-ha reunion will only come a few years later, at the concert for the 1998 Nobel Peace Prize ceremony (they will perform "Summer Moved On" in a lavish orchestral version), but it isn't until 2000 that their first new album in seven years, Minor Earth/Major Sky, will be released. Sales of the album prove rather good, bringing a-ha back into vogue in many countries (despite yet another MTV censoring of one of their videos, in this case "Velvet", accused of necrophilia).

Indeed, the dawn of the new millennium finally marks a phase of partial rehabilitation for a-ha, who gather praise from illustrious names such as U2 (whose "Beautiful Day", whether intentionally or not, recalls "The Sun Always Shines On TV" in certain passages), Leonard Cohen, Morrissey, the Pet Shop Boys, Coldplay and Oasis, to name but a few. Artistically, the album marks the start of a markedly lyrical and emotional phase (and a return to electronics) that will also define the records to come.

The album opens with the title track, a well-crafted song though stylistically somewhat isolated within the record's context. Its lyrics perfectly capture the sense of disorientation felt by someone trying to leave a mark on the vastness of space (a clear nod to his own artistic career?). Next comes "Little Black Heart", a small gem marked by a perfect harmony between music and words, moving in unison through shifting moods (with a skill reminiscent of the Beatles' "You Never Give Me Your Money"), and "Velvet" (a song already part of Savoy's repertoire) which winks at the singer-songwriter tradition (some parallels could be drawn with De André's "La canzone dell'amore perduto"), followed by an explosion of pathos with the melodramatic "Summer Moved On".

A sarcastic reflection on the band's own career, caught between genuine artistic inspiration and the pursuit of profitable commercial strategies, is the theme of "The Company Man". Also worth noting are "You'll Never Get Over Me", a poignant, intense composition with a "classic" flavor, and "Mary Ellen Makes The Moments Count", almost a reworking of the Beatles' "Eleanor Rigby".

Rather than innovation, a-ha now focus on emotion, giving full voice to feelings of loss, despondency, isolation and loneliness. Aside from a few moments of acute pain ("Summer Moved On"), the pervasive sense of deprivation running through the album is that of the disenchantment of maturity, reflecting on life's shortcomings.

The following Lifelines contains some interesting songs, but perhaps suffers from excessive unevenness. The record presents a "colder" sound compared to its predecessor, evoking 80s synth-pop atmospheres ("Forever Not Yours", "You Wanted More", "Did Anyone Approach You?"). The title track attempts to recapture the poignant mood of "Minor Earth/Major Sky", but indulges a little too much in an almost cloying emotional lyricism. Still, the album also has its happy moments, particularly Waaktaar's dark and brooding "Less Than Pure", probably the high point of the whole record.

In 2004 Savoy release a self-titled album, which gives its best in the closing track, "Isotope", a grim and apocalyptic ballad with a sound akin to Radiohead's "Lucky". Magne Furuholmen, meanwhile, releases his first album of proper songs, Past Perfect Future Tense, in which he abandons the experimentation of his earlier work. Despite some illustrious collaborators (Guy Berryman and Will Champion of Coldplay, and Andy Dunlop of Travis), the album doesn't stand out for any particular originality.

Analogue comes out in 2005. This album, like the one that follows it, shows a greater stylistic cohesion than Lifelines. a-ha's melancholic lyricism aims straight for the sublime, especially in Magne's hands, aided in the task by Morten Harket's celestial voice on tracks such as "Cosy Prisons", "Birthright" and "A Fine Blue Line". The album's character is in fact shaped by Furuholmen, who writes most of the songs, and who even manages to convincingly mimic Waaktaar's style on the closing gem "The Summers Of Our Youth".

The album opens with "Celice", perhaps its most stylistically ambitious track, combining icy 80s synths with warm 70s-style hard rock guitars. That 80s mood resurfaces in the keyboard work of the following "Don't Give Me Any Favours" (in which a-ha give a nod of thanks to their disciples Keane for the praise received) and then again in the title track.

Analogue boasts a remix courtesy of renowned producer Flood (already a collaborator of U2, Nine Inch Nails, Depeche Mode, Smashing Pumpkins, PJ Harvey, Erasure and Sigur Ros), as well as a prestigious collaboration with a classic name in rock history, Graham Nash (Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young), guest of honour on "Cosy Prisons" and "Over The Treetops". Rather than an innovative work, the album should be heard as one long emotional experience. The bare, cerebral coldness of "Celice" quickly gives way to the most intense emotion, which pervades the rest of the record and explodes in the closing "The Summers Of Our Youth". Melancholy, loss and conflict are rendered in the lyrics and melodies with apparent immediacy and simplicity, but the emotional tension always runs high.

Despite its artistic quality, the album disappointed many fans and critics, probably because it's a work that, more than others, requires repeated listens to be fully appreciated. Mindful of past experiences, a-ha made two versions of the "Celice" video, one more daring and another better suited to media rotation, but the album's overall sales fell undeservedly short of expectations. Still, the single "Analogue" had the merit of bringing a-ha back into the UK Top 10 after many years' absence.

Over the following four years, a-ha pursued solo projects. Morten made a new album, Letter From Egypt, again relying on Bjerkestrand's meticulous production, busy embellishing the record's tracks with elegant, polished sounds calibrated just right to enhance rather than bury Harket's vocals. Magne recorded a new album, A Dot Of Black In The Blue Of Your Bliss, which is more convincing than the earlier Past Perfect Future Tense. What makes the collection more worthy of attention is a greater use of electronics (evoking the synthetic atmospheres of the 80s, see "Come Back", "The Longest Night", "Too Far Too Fast") but also a greater knack for crafting pleasant, well-balanced yet never trivial songs with traditional instruments ("Time & Place", "Running Out Of Reasons").

Savoy would release a selection of songs from their albums (Songbook Vol. 1) along with some unreleased tracks, including the convincing "Best Western Beauty". Meanwhile, the solid loyalty of German audiences allows a-ha to take part in Berlin in the globally resonant media event Live 8, organised by Bob Geldof as a follow-up to the famous Live Aid of twenty years earlier.

In 2009 a-ha's final studio album, Foot Of The Mountain, comes out, and the band announces it is splitting up again. The record is stylistically rather cohesive, markedly geared towards recapturing the electronic atmospheres of the 80s. Fans generally embrace this apparent return to their roots, to the point that the album reaches number one in Germany and, surprisingly, number five in the UK chart (its highest placing since the days of Stay On These Roads).

In truth, the sounds that define Foot Of The Mountain aren't a mere rehash of the approach taken on their albums from that decade; the work is instead a retrospective rethinking of what those years actually were. The overall effect of this reinterpretation of the past is rather interesting.

The album alternates between wholly forgettable tracks and others of real worth. The title track, like many others, revisits themes from tracks Magne recorded in the past (particularly from his previous solo album, but also from Ti Kniver I Hjertet). High points are reached on the emotional "Shadowside", in which Waaktaar once again reckons with his dark side, on the intellectualist "Mother Nature Goes To Heaven", or on "Start The Simulator", an evocative space waltz that winks at Strauss's score for Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey", but also at the Beatles' "Being For The Benefit Of Mister Kite", and which in the end sounds like a demo still waiting to be polished up, left frozen in a drawer since the distant 1980s.

That the a-ha of their late career were searching for their own origins is also evident in the following year's releases, when, to celebrate twenty-five years of activity as well as to console fans ahead of their upcoming breakup, they put out deluxe editions of their first two albums and the definitive anthology 25, the only one that truly gathers all the Norwegian band's hits, from "Take On Me" to the unreleased "Butterfly, Butterfly (The Last Hurrah)", a poignant, moving Waaktaar composition that serves as a farewell to their fans, as well as a carefully chosen selection of fan favourites and single versions hard to find in digital format.

Meanwhile, Magne Furuholmen finally returns to experimentation, founding the supergroup Apparatjik together with Martin Terefe (already a collaborator on his previous solo albums and on Analogue), Guy Berryman of Coldplay and Jonas Bjerre of Mew. The band's first recorded album is We Are Here: the experiment of elevating rough demo sounds to the dignity of a finished product becomes the key stylistic principle. Equally striking is the visual and multimedia side of the Apparatjik project, built on a kind of scientific surrealism grounded in the distortion of theoretical physics concepts (space-time dimensions, the entanglement theorem, quantum mechanics, geometric solids…). Between coy falsetto choruses and catchy melodies, We Are Here comes across as a sampler of synthetic sounds for every taste, ultimately an ambiguous, unclassifiable record (new wave revival? Experimentation? Dance? Commercial pop music? Pure kitsch?) — and that is precisely where its charm lies.

As a final act, a-ha tour the world for their farewell tour, moving between Japan, North America, South America and Europe, before officially ending their activity on 4 December 2010 in Oslo in front of an audience that had travelled from all over the world (although, in fact, the chance for an unplanned reunion would come again the following year, at a charity concert in aid of the victims of the Utøya massacre).

Morten Harket's fifth solo album, Out Of My Hands, is a work radically different from its predecessors, to the point that those earlier records can now be seen, by comparison, as a unified chapter apart. Here there are no more of Bjerkestrand's eclectic productions; instead, the album immerses itself in refined synth-pop thanks to the contribution of Steve Osborne, who had already served as producer on Foot Of The Mountain. The record moves track by track in a smooth, light way, but without leaving any deep marks. There's a lot of care put into crafting the songs, as always, and Morten's voice is, as ever, well controlled, but the whole thing feels more like a work of "craft" than of genuine inspiration. Worth noting, however, is a contribution written specially by the Pet Shop Boys ("Listening"), which may spark interest among genre fans.

The urge to make music still seems endless, so much so that, the day after the split, Waaktaar founds a new group with Jonny Gnecco of Ours, called Weathervane, recording a song of the same name, while Furuholmen presses on confidently with the Apparatjik project. Particularly interesting is the production strategy behind the band's second album, which fully captures the interactive spirit of our era, in which the audience increasingly takes centre stage. Apparatjik make a draft of the new work available on a dedicated online forum, giving listeners the chance to download the tracks and remix them as they please, as well as to submit their own versions to the band with the opportunity of having them included in the album's final version. An online marketing strategy that clearly outdoes those previously used, to such great fanfare, by Radiohead.

Square Peg In A Round Hole is born this way, and the names of the authors of the final versions are printed on the CD case. However, this "choral" work falls short of expectations: it seems the supergroup has lost much of the fresh compositional creativity that had characterized their first album. For the most part, the record is an empty divertissement – while on We Are Here the falsetto choruses were buoyed by thrilling melodies ("Josie", "Look Kids"), here they express a hollow, glossy aestheticism that makes Apparatjik a pale imitation of Empire Of The Sun (and perhaps a touch of Gorillaz too). There is still something worth noting, though: the choruses of "BlastLocket" could well appeal to the best, most "exoticizing" side of David Byrne. Apparatjik even manage to pull off a mainstream coup: "Do It Myself" is made together with hip-hop star Pharrell, member of N*E*R*D*.

In 2014, Morten Harket, perhaps not entirely satisfied with the middling pop results of his previous work, tries to look back to the past of Wild Seed and once again dons the clothes of the professional songwriter on the album Brother. Indeed, he would announce the new record to the press precisely as the successor to his successful 1995 solo debut. It is, in every respect, a reprise of stylistic canons Harket had already explored on his previous records, but one that stays well short of his past peaks, settling instead for a rather lifeless mannerism, even though the compositional effort is evident. The same goes for the production, marked by the best of intentions but lacking the creative spark that defined Bjerkestrand's contribution on earlier works. Worth noting, however, are the opening title track and the closing "First Man On The Grave".

Despite the officially announced split at the end of 2010, a-ha surprisingly return with a brand-new album, Cast In Steel, in 2015, defying both critics and fans with a decisive return to the underrated Analogue of ten years earlier. The main focus of all three band members is on crafting emotionally moving melodies alongside a compositional elegance once again aimed at reaching the sublime. A crystalline, calligraphic perfection brings to life tracks like the title track and the following "Under The Make Up", while "Objects In The Mirror", "She's Humming A Tune" and "Goodbye Thompson" stand out for their intense, aching melodic and vocal style. Also successful is Magne Furuholmen's new techno-synth excursion on "Mythomania", close to the happy Depeche Mode-like results of "Cannot Hide" from Lifelines or "The Bandstand" from Foot Of The Mountain.

Rumors circulate that this reunion is only temporary, limited to the release of the album and its promotional tour. But the desire to make music together seems anything but dormant, and indeed in 2022 True North comes out, their eleventh studio album, accompanied by an eponymous docu-film by their photographer friend Stian Andersen. The record was recorded in just two days at the Svømmehallen concert hall in Bodø, in collaboration with the local Arctic Philharmonic orchestra, which had previously earned praise working alongside Philip Glass and Anneli Drecker of Bel Canto.

The idea behind this studio live album is similar in tone to the 2017 MTV Unplugged – Summer Solstice: six of the twelve songs on the tracklist are penned by guitarist Paul Waaktaar-Savoy, while the rest are the work of keyboardist Magne Furuholmen, who presented the package to the press as a "letter from the far north of Norway". Harket is thus somewhat removed from the creative process, but his proverbial, near-limitless falsetto remains the band's sharpest weapon. The concept ponders the interaction between man and nature in a bleak post-pandemic picture: the environment we live in is constantly put to the test by the dangers of global warming, and in this sense the delicate opening schlager "I'm In", released as the first single, offers a rock to cling to while sheltering from the storm surge ("give in, don't give up/ whatever you want or need I'm in, begin"). The second track, "Hunter In The Hills", presents polar-opposite rhythmic structures: a jazzy start for bass and drums alone before big-band-style strings burst in, 1920s fashion. Influences from Frank Sinatra and Burt Bacharach are also evident on "As If", likewise released as a single thanks to a chorus that's a strong candidate for radio-hit status.

The aching "Between The Halo And The Horn" ("your defenses on judgment day are meaningless/ roses and thorns, how we are wounded") steers back into more intimate waters with engaging melodic shifts; not everything works perfectly, but what's satisfying to the ear is the fact that every song somehow echoes a distinctive trait from a different phase of the band's history. Furuholmen and Waaktaar-Savoy manage to skillfully handle both retro flair and contemporary taste, while the composed performances of frontman Harket rise above the arrangements themselves.

The title track "True North" quotes the 1988 masterpiece "Stay On The Roads", yet shines with fresh nuances; the glittering synths that secured everlasting glory in the Eighties live again instead in the midtempo "Forest In The Trees" and in "Make Me Understand". In the lovely choral tongue-twister "Bluest Of Blue" (violins by Madeleine Ossum) and in the sweet, hopeful ballad "You Have What It Takes", every temptation toward grandiosity is deliberately disguised within elegant chamber-pop arrangements despite their potential-hit DNA; also beautiful is the nostalgic "Summer Rain", which despite its title evokes autumnal atmospheres, with Harket dipping into his lowest octaves and a good balance between strings and keyboards. Less flashy but by no means negligible are, finally, "Bumblebee", with its superb jazz improvisations, and the dreamy closing waltz "Oh My Word" – the only flaw perhaps the overly sprawling sequencing of the tracks, but a price worth paying to safeguard expressive freedom.

At last the three captains seem to be sailing in the same direction – let's hope they keep going this way.

Contributions by Giuseppe D'Amato ("True North")

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