“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. The new quartet clicked, and as their songs gained traction with Swedish club DJs, they quickly wanted to secure a record deal. They grafted reggae’s spacious groove and off-beat percussion onto their own chirping synth-pop, creating a sweet spot in the middle. 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. Alban reworked the sound with a Eurodance pulse. 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. When the original bassist missed a performance to catch a Rolling Stones show the same night, Ekberg filled in and formally replaced him. 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. “I now regret all of this, but I can hardly change the past.”ĭespite his history, Jonas and Ekberg struck up a friendship as they worked on separate music in the same rehearsal space. 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. A poster bearing the latter band’s name hung in his studio like a talisman.Īt 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.

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. 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.

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. The Berggrens grew up in Gothenburg, an industrial port city on the western coast of Sweden.

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