It’s 25 years ago next month that a certain Norwegian synth-pop trio first entered the Billboard Hot 100 with a song that would become one of the most beloved of its era, and a video that still looks as ground-breaking and exciting as it was in 1985: “Take On Me”. Though a-ha never managed another U.S. hit of that magnitude (or even close), they never really went away. Well, except for that time when they went on hiatus for most of the 90s. But with last summer’s lovely album Foot of the Mountain, and their current “Ending on a High Note” world tour, lead singer Morten Harket, keyboardist Magne Furuholmen, and guitarist-songwriter Pal Waaktaar-Savoy are, in fact, calling it a career. But not without a small postscript. The band will release what will presumably be their last single, called “Butterfly, Butterfly (The Last Hurrah)”, for digital download in July. After news of the new single was leaked by a mixing engineer, the song made its official world premiere on the internet via Warner Music Norway last week. For a good-bye song, “Butterfly, Butterfly” is remarkably unspectacular – just a typically sweet, three-minute, mid-tempo, synth-pop song, with a matter-of-fact vocal performance by Harket well in keeping with Waaktaar’s ambivalent farewell of a lyric: Tomorrow, you don’t have to mean what you say/left without a reason to stay/comes the last hurrah. The single is being released in conjunction with a forthcoming 2-disc retrospective set, and coincides with Rhino Records’ recent deluxe edition reissues of the band’s first two albums Hunting High and Low and Scoundrel Days.
