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SYNTH WEEK 2026: “There really is a great potential between the three of us,” said A-ha singer Morten Harket. “But to get that out of us is not easy – and it has never been easy.”
Harket was talking in 2009 for the release of the Norwegian trio’s ninth studio album Foot Of The Mountain.
Even at their commercial peak in the ’80s, there was always tension between the three members of A-ha – Harket, keyboard player Magne Furuholmen and guitarist Paul Waaktaar-Savoy.
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But with Foot Of The Mountain they had delivered an accomplished album – a return to the classic pop sound that made them one of the biggest acts in the world.
“There’s a very good spirit to this album,” Harket said. “We’re reaching out again, and that’s healthy for us. This album is as important as anything we’ve ever done.”
Foot Of The Mountain was written and recorded in various major cities – from Oslo, where the band formed in 1982, to New York, where Waaktaar-Savoy lived.
The album’s 10 songs carried echoes of the band’s early signature hits: Take On Me, The Sun Always Shines On TV, I’ve Been Losing You.
“It’s predominantly a synth-based album,” Harket said. “We tried different versions of the songs, but in the end we came back to synths.
“It’s how we started out in the ‘80s before we became more interested in acoustic and analogue instruments. This is a return to synth-based thinking.”
Furuholmen stated: “This is a potent and vibrant album. It has a vitality.”
Referring to the emotive power of A-ha’s songwriting, Furuholmen added: “This is an unashamedly passionate album. It’s uptempo but not exactly upbeat. Upbeat means happier – and I don’t think this is the case.”
As the group’s main songwriter, Waaktaar-Savoy composed five of the tracks alone and four with Furuholmen.
He also experimented with some new techniques. The song Riding The Crest – which Waaktaar-Savoy described as “an electro blues” – was inspired by Arcade Fire’s use of the 12-bar form on their 2007 album Neon Bible.
Another song, Real Meaning was a happy accident: an idea that came spontaneously when Waaktaar-Savoy called home from Russia and was greeted by his answering machine. “As I joke I started singing away and this song fell out,” he laughed. “I meant every word, though.”
Most unorthodox of all was Start The Simulator. Waaktaar-Savoy employed a novel lyrical style, drawing on the technical jargon of the Cold War era’s Space Race.
“The basic idea,” he said, “was to make a song using only technical terms and phrases, and still make it very emotional and personal. There is such poetry in the old Apollo manuals: ‘Switch to Omni Bravo’ and ‘the bright ejecta blanket’.”
Start The Simulator was also experimental in the musical sense.
“It was quite a hard song to record,” Waaktaar-Savoy said. “It changes both time signatures and keys as it goes along. What sounded so simple on the piano got very quickly complicated when it was translated to a full arrangement. I think we got there in the end though!”
In other songs he explored his emotional connection to his natural and adopted homelands.
Shadowside, he said, “feels quite Norwegian – in the melody, the chords and the mood”.
The Bandstand reminded him of his first trip to New York City in the early ‘80s, before A-Ha were famous.
“Songs are like a photo-album,” he mused. “They can really send you back. And this one reminds me of arriving at Port Authority with $35 in my pocket, sporting really high, yellow, almost see-through synthesizer-hair, wearing a tiger-shirt and a brown suit, looking like an alien!”
The album’s title track was fashioned from two previously separate songs, one written by Waaktaar-Savoy, the other by Furuholmen. The lyrics examined one of the fundamental conflicts of modern life – the pull between nature and big-city civilization. For Waaktaar-Savoy, the contrast between the buzz of New York City and the beauty and isolation of Norway.
As he put it: “It’s the dilemma of loving a city life, yet secretly wondering if we’d be happier being surrounded by open fields and sweeping mountains.”
Waaktaar-Savoy said of the recording sessions in New York: “We spent five weeks in Hoboken recording the first draft of the album. I was bringing in tons of instruments, arriving every morning with new toys, like old synths and string-machines, omnichord, stylophone, Moog guitar, Mellotron, guitars in every shape and size…”
According to Furuholmen, “The time spent in New York was definitely important for this record.”
Harket agreed. “The energy of the city may have had an effect on the music. But we didn’t complete in New York – we had to go back to Norway just to let things cool off a little and then pick it up. And we did – we nailed it.”
As for the relationships within the group, Furuholmen summed it up as diplomatically as he could.
“It’s complicated,” he smiled. “It’s always challenging. Three is a very tricky number.”
