a-ha on stage in Montreux, July 2022
All three a-ha members have done various press interviews in the last few weeks, to promote a new Super Deluxe Edition 6LP vinyl box set of Hunting High and Low. The set was released on 24 February by BMG, under license from Warner Music, and is available from Amazon UK and Amazon Germany.
Although the music content is exactly the same as on the 30th Anniversary Super Deluxe Edition 4CD+DVD set first released in 2015 and reissued as an Expanded Edition 4CD set in 2019, it’s the first time this set has been made available on vinyl.
The new HHAL Super Deluxe vinyl box set
An unboxing video of the new Super Deluxe vinyl set has been posted on YouTube by Paul Sinclair of the SDE website.
Magne and Paul have both been interviewed (separately) for extensive articles in MusicRadar and Rolling Stone Germany, going in-depth about the early days of a-ha and the Hunting High and Low recording process.
Magne has also been interviewed by the website Cryptic Rock.
Meanwhile Morten has talked to UK’s Big Issue magazine, posted online in two different articles here and here, the Sunday Express newspaper, Retropop Magazine and RND in Germany.
Additionally, an interview with Paul appears in the recently published book Dancing to the Drum Machine: How Electronic Percussion Conquered the World, written by Dan LeRoy. The interview (which was done in early 2021) has also been posted online by the author on Substack.
As for what lies ahead, Magne mentioned in an Instagram post on 5 February that he’s working on a new album:
“in other news, i have started working on a new album, and trying to find creative ways of doing it differently this time, so that’s another thing to look backward to this year! plus there are the usual exhibitions, london in april among them, and so on.”
What kind of album Magne is referring to is still unknown, but he did mention in the Classic Pop interview in October 2022 that there may be a new Apparatjik album at some point: “We’ve talked about going into the mountains with acoustic instruments to make a folk album.”
Morten has been working on new songs with Peter Kvint that may end up as a new solo album: “I’ve started to write more lyrics on my own, and feel pretty happy about that”. There is also the possibility of a solo compilation album and a reissue of Wild Seed: “I might pull together a compilation from the totality of everything I’ve done that best represents me. But a reissue of Wild Seed might happen too”, Morten told Classic Pop last year.
Paul continues to be busy in the studio and his long-awaited Waaktaar solo album might see the light of day soon:
“I don’t want to give too much away, but it’s almost there. I had so many songs lying around, and this record will mean that I can sing some of those and have other people sing some, too. There is a lot of freedom to the album, I can say that for sure”, Paul told Classic Pop.
There is also a new Savoy album in the making, for which 12 demos were recorded with drummer Frode Unneland last summer.
More a-ha reissues could also be expected. Both a vinyl box set of the first 5 albums and new deluxe editions of Analogue and Foot Of The Mountain are in the works, according to a-ha manager Harald Wiik last year.
