A-ha a band from Norway was founded in 1982 by Morten Harket , Magne Furuholmen, and Pål Waaktaar. The trio composed of lead vocalist Morten Harket; guitarist Paul Waaktaar-Savoy (previously known as Pål Waaktaar until 1994); and keyboardist Magne Furuholmen (informally known as Mags), they left Norway for London to make a career in the music industry.

An early version of Take on Me was the first song that Morten Harket heard Magne Furuholmen and Pål Waaktaar play in Asker. At that time, the song was called The Juicy Fruit Song, and the two men were still known as Bridges. Take on Me became a hit on both sides of the Atlantic in 1985 and was the second-best-selling single of 1985. A-ha became the first Norwegian band to have a number 1 song in the U.S. The song's popularity earned the band a spot on the American television series Soul Train in 1985, making them one of the few white artists to appear on the black music-oriented show. The video became one of the most instantly recognizable and most  popular music videos in the U.S., where it was nominated for eight awards at the third annual MTV Video Awards in 1986, winning six, including Best New Artist in a Video, Best Concept Video, Best Direction, Best Special Effects, and Viewer's Choice. Take on Me was also nominated for Best Video of the Year at the 1986 American Music Awards. Their six MTV Award wins for that video gave them twice as many wins as Michael Jackson's Thriller and more than any artist in the three years of the awards combined. The band's first album, 1985's Hunting High and Low, became a worldwide bestseller, it brought international recognition for A-ha. Hunting High and Low earned triple platinum status in the UK, and reached platinum status in the US and Germany, while earning gold in Brazil and the Netherlands. A-ha's second album, Scoundrel Days, was released in the midst of the 1986. In May 1988, A-ha released their third studio album, titled Stay On These Roads, which matched the number-two chart peak of its two predecessors on the British album charts. Stay on These Roads has been certified Platinum in Brazil and France and Gold in Switzerland, Germany, UK, and the Netherlands. The album includes the title-track theme song to the James Bond film The Living Daylights. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, A-ha was very popular in South America, especially in Brazil. Their last album before their break was Memorial Beach, in 1993. A-ha entered a hiatus period in 1994, and band members then focused on solo projects.

The band was invited to perform at the Nobel Peace Prize Concert in 1998 and then in 2001. The succeeding album, Lifelines, was released in 2002, going platinum in Norway and producing two Top 5 hits, Forever Not Yours and Lifelines. In 2004, a book named The Swing of Things was published, with a CD of early demo material. That year A-ha celebrated their twentieth anniversary with the release of a new singles collection, The Definitive Singles Collection 1984–2004. This compilation brought them back into the UK Top 20 Album Charts, where they reached number thirteen and earned a Gold album. On 24 January 2009, twenty-five years after its first release, A-ha won the Norwegian Spelleman award for Hit of All Time for Take On Me on the 50th anniversary of the official hit list in Norway.

Furuholmen revealed in an interview published in Magasinet, the magazine section of Norway's third largest newspaper, Dagbladet, that he's suffering from a heart disease. At the Spellemannprisen award show on March 5, 2011 in Oslo, Norway, the band received the Spellemannprisen honorary award handed out by a-ha's Norwegian music colleagues with the words Our Heroes - Once upon a time, now - still and forever.