Roxette Essentials

Following in Sweden's grand tradition of producing cosmically great pop music, duo Per Gessle and Marie Fredriksson came together in Halmstad in the mid-'80s to form Roxette. Their soaring, feel-good tunes, which were packed with catchy hooks, hard-strummed guitars and Fredriksson's pane-rattling vocals, almost never made it out of Europe; an American studying abroad brought back a copy of 1988's Look Sharp! and got it to a Minneapolis radio station, and it caught fire from there. By 1989, that attention had spread worldwide and turned songs such as the swelling ballads “Listen to Your Heart” and “It Must Have Been Love” (the latter of which featured on the soundtrack to Pretty Woman) and the sugar-rush rocker “The Look” into international hits. Gessle and Fredriksson continued to record and tour into the 2010s, even after Fredriksson was diagnosed with brain cancer in 2002. She died in 2019 at the age of 61.