a‐ha / Memorial Beach / 1993
Locust
tense, hushed, ominous
A brooding meditation on dread and paralysis dressed in nocturnal, almost biblical imagery. The song circles anxiety about impending change without ever naming its source, landing on a swarm-of-locusts vision as its one concrete, apocalyptic image.
anxiety and uncertainty apocalyptic foreboding inertia versus the need for change reassurance that doesn't quite convince nature as omen
Who's speaking
A narrator addresses someone close -- a partner or perhaps themselves -- offering reassurance about a frightening night sky while admitting total uncertainty about what to actually do. The reassurance reads as unstable, maybe self-directed as much as aimed at the listener.
What happens
The song opens with a soothing but unconvincing line about the moon being harmless, immediately undercut by an admission that life needs to change. A call-and-response develops: someone asks what to do, and the answer is a stammering refusal to know, repeated as a kind of nervous tic. Nature imagery darkens -- weeping, grieving, a rabbit-quick wind -- before a plea for mercy and a request not to be told when the end is coming. The song's clearest moment arrives as a recounted dream: a grey cloud that turns out to be a locust swarm, the oldest image of plague and ruin. The piece then retreats to its opening reassurance, repeated twice, as if trying to convince itself.
How it's built
Built on a tight, circular form: a verse of unease, a stuttering chorus-like refrain of not-knowing, an interlude of elemental imagery, then the dream-vision bridge that is the song's only vivid, image-driven moment. The final return to the opening couplet, doubled, closes the loop rather than resolving it, reinforcing the song's static, trapped feeling.
Section by section
Opening verse
“it's a harmless moon”
The reassurance is pitched almost too gently, as if trying to talk someone (or oneself) down from fear before fear has even been named. The immediate pivot to demanding change signals that the calm is provisional.
First refrain
The broken, childlike repetition of not knowing acts less as an answer than as a release valve -- it converts anxious energy into rhythm, letting the song avoid resolution rather than seek it.
Nature interlude
“rabbit wind / you just flew by”
Short, fragmented addresses to sky and wind suggest a mind scanning the environment for signs, finding only transient, unreadable gestures rather than explanation.
Plea section
“don't announce the time of the final call”
This is the song's most direct brush with mortality -- a request to be spared foreknowledge of an ending, which reframes all the preceding vagueness as fear of death or collapse rather than mere restlessness.
Dream bridge
“a slate-grey cloud / comes through the dust”
The dream sequence finally gives the dread a shape. What first reads as weather resolves into an insect swarm, a classic emblem of devastation, turning abstract unease into something approaching prophecy.
Closing repetition
Returning to the opening line twice, with no new information added, suggests the reassurance has become compulsive rather than comforting -- the song ends where it began, unresolved and self-soothing in a way that feels hollow.
Craft
- anaphora
- The repeated 'I don't know' structure mimics stammering avoidance, turning indecision into the song's rhythmic engine rather than just its subject.
- apostrophe
- Direct address to natural phenomena -- the night, the sky, the wind -- treats them as sentient witnesses or omens, heightening the sense of being watched by forces beyond control.
- symbolism
- The locust, arriving only in the final verses, functions as a biblical emblem of plague and reckoning, retroactively coloring the vaguer dread of the earlier verses.
- ironic reassurance
- The repeated claim about the moon being harmless is undercut by everything around it, so the line reads less as comfort than as a mantra against panic.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats this as a song about dread that refuses to specify its object -- political, environmental, personal, or existential -- using the locust as the one moment the unconscious mind supplies an actual image for impending ruin. An alternative reading takes it more literally as an environmental or end-times anxiety piece, with the locust swarm read as ecological collapse rather than metaphor; the song's refusal to clarify keeps both readings open.
Context
Memorial Beach (1993) marked a deliberately darker, more guitar-driven, less commercially minded turn for a-ha after their 1980s pop peak, often read as the band pushing back against their teen-idol image. I don't have reliable specific information about this song's writing circumstances, so this context is general rather than song-specific.
Listen for
- the stammering delivery of the 'I don't know' refrain and how it functions almost percussively
- the shift in tone when the dream/locust imagery arrives, compared to the vaguer dread before it
- how the vocal performance treats the opening reassurance differently on its final repetition
- the sparse, elemental imagery (moon, wind, sky) used to build atmosphere without concrete narrative detail
About a‐ha
A-ha are a Norwegian synth-pop band formed in Oslo in 1982. Founded by Paul Waaktaar-Savoy, Magne Furuholmen, and Morten Harket, the band rose to fame during the mid-1980s.
1983 - present / Norway
Full biography and catalogue