The Sign

In the early 1990s, four unassuming Swedes created a snappy, newly digitized sound that took hold of the world. Ace of Base locked into a style that radio programmers, record execs, and fans latched onto with equal fervor, devising an unheard-of blend of upbeat synthpop cranked with a reggae-influenced bottom end that ushered in a renaissance of Swedish pop imports that continues to dominate charts to this day. But for siblings Jonas, Jenny, and Malin “Linn” Berggren and friend Ulf Ekberg, all in their early 20s at the time, the quick ascent was a surreal head trip. “I never thought I’d come anywhere in the world,” Jenny, one of Ace of Base’s singers, admitted in 1994, at the height of the band’s multimillion-selling peak. “I figured maybe I would see all of Europe, and that would be it.” Yet with the group’s unstoppable debut album, The Sign—which, at over 26 million units, remains one of the best-selling albums of all time—the band quickly went much farther.

The Berggrens grew up in Gothenburg, an industrial port city on the western coast of Sweden. The siblings studied classical music in school, and as they grew older each found a musical outlet: While sisters Jenny and Linn sang in a church choir, older brother Jonas became an Italo disco obsessive who sported a rattail and bleached hair and performed in local bands that traded in New Romantic synth-pop. By the late ’80s, he entered a Swedish government program for aspiring musicians, which afforded him a rehearsal space and some cheap equipment to experiment with. There he worked on music that combined melodies inspired by ’80s synth-pop legends Depeche Mode and A Flock of Seagulls with thrumming percussion that shared the nervy pulse of Kraftwerk. A poster bearing the latter band’s name hung in his studio like a talisman.

At 20, Ekberg was coming out of a phase as a member of a skinhead gang—he’d performed in a neo-Nazi group called Commit Suiside, a fact that haunted Ace of Base when they first got famous and European reporters picked up on it. He blamed banal reasoning for his past: “I used to indulge in drugs and violence, which culminated in my association with the worst form of rebellion: the skinheads,” he said in a statement released the same year as The Sign in a minimal effort at damage control. “I now regret all of this, but I can hardly change the past.”

Despite his history, Jonas and Ekberg struck up a friendship as they worked on separate music in the same rehearsal space. Jonas, eager to start a band of his own, enlisted his sisters Jenny and Linn to supply cheery vocals, forming the first iteration of a group called Tech Noir after the night club in The Terminator. When the original bassist missed a performance to catch a Rolling Stones show the same night, Ekberg filled in and formally replaced him. As they created new demos together, reggae groups often rehearsed down the hall—the genre was gaining popularity in the country by the early ’90s, as local acts like Dr. Alban reworked the sound with a Eurodance pulse. The coincidental proximity of working reggae musicians exerted an osmotic influence on Jonas and Ekberg, setting off a lightbulb that transformed their music for good. They grafted reggae’s spacious groove and off-beat percussion onto their own chirping synth-pop, creating a sweet spot in the middle.

The new quartet clicked, and as their songs gained traction with Swedish club DJs, they quickly wanted to secure a record deal. “Jonas and Ulf were pushy to get what they want,” Linn, who, like her sister, had no formal experience as a leading vocalist, said in 1997. “But the toll was, we’ll just see what happens.” The newly rechristened Ace of Base released their debut single, “Wheel of Fortune,” in 1992, essentially nailing their formula on the first go: enthusiastic synth melodies, weaving percussive rhythms, and the Berggren sisters’ swooping voices. Yet it also contains a melancholic undercurrent that pulls at the corners of their best songs. That bittersweetness is their irresistible, maudlin draw, one that would become key to Ace of Base’s massive appeal.

“Wheel of Fortune” got some regional radio play, specifically in Denmark. Ace of Base recorded a few more tracks and sent a demo tape to Danish imprint Mega Records, rather than to Swedish labels, which they’d found were only interested in the group’s slower ballads. The gamble paid off once the demos reached Scandi-pop impresario Dag Krister Volle, known as Denniz Pop. Pop was responsible for the sleek choruses and R&B inflections that turned Sweden’s young singers and songwriters like Dr. Alban and Kayo into a hit factory in the early ’90s, a sound that would eventually filter through acts like Robyn and *NSYNC in the decade to come. As fate would have it, Ace of Base’s tape got jammed in the cassette player of Pop’s car, forcing him to listen to it nonstop. One of the demo tracks, the loping “Mr. Ace,” got stuck in his head badly enough that he decided to produce a single.

“Mr. Ace,” which evolved into the near-perfect “All That She Wants,” depicts a woman cycling through lovers, tilting the mood toward heartbreak despite the bright chords. Originally centered on a peppy major-chord horn section, the song changed because Linn, a forceful vocalist who was now tasked with singing lead on the bulk of the band’s tracks, insisted that the melody should shift to a minor chord. Even in its spare original form, it’s a pivotal difference: the song moves with a tugging, introspective swing, anchored by Linn’s aching performance. She ramps up the drama behind the refrain “she lives a lonely life,” each repetition echoing like an afterimage. The song landed at radio in summer 1992 and rocketed to No. 1 in Denmark before quickly expanding across the rest of Europe.

When “All That She Wants” hit No. 1 in the UK, a significant feat for any European artist at the time, Mega’s priority became crafting an album to package it alongside “Wheel of Fortune,” which had similarly reached gold in Denmark. To record The Sign, Ace of Base decamped to their own studio—in a rundown house on the outskirts of Gothenburg shared with an automotive shop—and moved at lightning speed to complete writing and recording in just three weeks. “It was too fast, definitely,” Ekberg admitted in 1998. “Some of the songs we didn’t have time to mix or record again. We had to take the demo versions and just finalize them a little bit.” Many of the resulting songs on The Sign, released first as Happy Nation in November 1992, sound as rushed as its genesis, with repetitive arrangements and awkward lyrics throughout. It came out of an urge for “singalong music on the dance floor,” as Jenny put it. “What I enjoy singing about most is that a lot of bad things are happening, so you have to focus on the good parts,” she said.

Even a total lack of attention to detail can’t suppress The Sign’s exuberant attitude. Optimism floods the entire album, whose lyrics flit between romantic troubles and positive sloganeering with wispy attempts at finding meaning in the contradiction. For every “All That She Wants,” there’s a house-inspired misfire (“Voulez-vous danser”) or plasticky ’80s nostalgia (“Dancer in a Daydream”). In “Münchhausen (Just Chaos),” a mystifying selection that only appeared on the Happy Nation version of the album, they transplant the infamous liar’s tall tales onto a techno-fried, convulsive backdrop. You get the sense someone pointed to a bookcase at random as a source of dire, last-minute inspiration.

Yet the group constantly surprises you, even in their programmatic moments. They thrive during the vocoder-heavy “Waiting for Magic,” one of the album’s most underrated moments, an ode to dancefloor hookups that pinwheels out into a rapid-fire staccato chorus. Like several songs on the album, it borrows from the inscrutability of Italo disco to create a template for future Swedish pop, in which lyrics need not make complete sense so long as they fit a lilting melody (“I am Snow White in a coffin waiting for you/Waiting for magic” is about as deep as their metaphors go). The writing doesn’t hamper the album so much as amplify its uncanny digital luster. The same goes for the original title track, “Happy Nation,” written as an “antifascist song and a hymn to life” following the unearthing of Ekberg’s skinhead past, a choice that colors the entire album in a reactive light. Pivoting to lurching drums and echoing liturgical backing vocals in Latin, the song breaks away into chanted lyrics about brotherhood and uniting mankind; it’s oddly effective and deeply unserious at once.

Happy Nation spread quickly, selling over a million copies across Europe within the year. Ace of Base’s success piqued the interest of American music executive Clive Davis at Arista, who signed the group for a U.S. re-release. He required that they replace some of the original album’s 13 tracks with fresh singles to give the re-release more American appeal and an edge over the flood of imports. At his insistence, they covered Albert Hammond and Diane Warren’s “Don’t Turn Around,” originally a Tina Turner B-side and another of The Sign’s pleading highlights, and filled it out with another song, “Living in Danger,” a lesser retread of “All That She Wants.” Then, in another twist of fate, the album found its new title in a song that almost didn’t end up on the re-release at all. “The Sign,” another Denniz Pop co-production and undeniable pop bauble that combines all the group’s best impulses—bobbing rhythm, eccentric production tics, lovably inane lyrics—was intended for a follow-up album, but on Davis’ order it became their next single. The choice unmistakably ensured the song’s seismic impact after the album was released in the U.S. in winter 1993, rounding out the trio of singles that would take them to No. 1. The charming, greenscreen-heavy video for “The Sign” secured constant rotation on MTV, a vital source of exposure that inspired impostor groups bearing names like Bass of Spades and Box of Laces.

By March 1994, “The Sign” topped the Billboard Hot 100 for an impressive six non-consecutive weeks. Ace of Base’s chokehold over radio was unprecedented—all three of their singles also reached No. 1 on the Mainstream Top 40 airplay chart, making them the first band in history to rack up that achievement with a debut album. With “The Sign” in particular, it’s easy to see why: that funky beat, the strangely processed whistle, and Jenny and Linn’s ascending, occasionally growling dual performances are irresistibly sunny. Even as critics took every opportunity to call the band ABBA clones, often straight to their faces (“If you ask us an ABBA question, it’ll cost you five bucks,” Linn once joked to a reporter), and dinged them for their repetitive sound, Ace of Base’s persistence and distinct blend of genres made them stars outside of their counterparts’ shadow. Much like white artists throughout history who have rewired Black music into a diluted, more commercially palatable form, from Elvis to the Beach Boys, their whitewashing of reggae worked wonders in the mainstream. It helped that their featherlight sound, entirely synthetic and draped in a blanket message of optimism, doubled as counter-programming to the grimmer themes of the grunge and rap music then climbing the charts. It was a contrast they often amplified themselves: “I don’t think the lyrics are the best in the world,” Jonas admitted to Entertainment Weekly, “but they’re not about ‘I shot them down,’ or ‘I’ll kill that or that or that.’”

The instant rush of fame left a lasting mark on the group, especially its women. “I liked the success in Europe, but after that, all my interest was lost there,” Linn said of The Sign’s sudden ubiquity. They traveled on press tours for the better part of two years, leading to swift burnout. Linn, the primary singer and the face of the band, was subject to an intense spotlight. Most terrifying of all, in 1994 a would-be fan broke into the Berggrens’ family home and held Jenny at knifepoint. After three follow-up albums featuring the original lineup—The Bridge, Flowers (released in the U.S. as Cruel Summer), and Da Capo—both Linn and Jenny left the group. The Sign remains Ace of Base’s most essential album, a crystallization of pop music as it transitioned toward synthesizer-based production and pronounced Sweden as a veritable hub of pop songwriting. In the decade to come, aspiring American stars like Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys would jet to Scandinavia in search of radio-conquering hits.

Though Ace of Base never reached the same level again, their music has had a longer, more curious afterlife than one could have anticipated. You can hear its influence within titanic turn-of-the-2010s pop albums like Lady Gaga’s The Fame Monster and Katy Perry’s Teenage Dream; both singers have also worked with Swedish producer Max Martin, who was running coffee for Denniz Pop around the same time that his mentor was producing Ace of Base. By design, it’s hard to resist their upbeat, stylized reggae-pop. Today, turn on any pop radio station and one of their hits from The Sign will turn up eventually, bopping along like a waving palm tree, as absurdly catchy an example of pop music’s simplest pleasures now as it was then.

Additional research by Deirdre McCabe Nolan.