First Band on the Moon
1996 studio album by The Cardigans
First Band on the Moon is the third studio album by Swedish rock band the Cardigans. It features the international single "Lovefool". It was first released on 6 September 1996.
The album marked a major breakthrough for the band, both in Sweden and internationally. It is their best-selling album in the United States, with approximately 664,000 copies sold there as of September 2010.
Critical reception
AllMusic critic John Bush viewed First Band on the Moon as a return to the "mood and feel" of the Cardigans' 1994 debut album Emmerdale, with a new lyrical focus on "unfaithful lovers" and, in the case of "Lovefool", "unrequited affection". He noted that while its stylistic shift from its 1995 predecessor Life may confuse listeners, the album is buoyed by Nina Persson's vocals and Peter Svensson's arrangements, "the Cardigans' core strengths".
Track listing
"Happy Meal II" is a re-recording of "Happy Meal", a song that was originally a bonus track on the US edition of Life, with some minor lyric changes.
Black Sabbath connections
At least two songs on the album directly reference Black Sabbath material. In addition to the cover "Iron Man", "Heartbreaker" begins and ends with a quotation of the primary material from the song "Black Sabbath", the first track on Black Sabbath's debut album.
“First Band on the Moon” enters the record as 1996 studio album by The Cardigans. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what First, Band and Moon can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Attribution, date and provenance are strongest when supported by the original work, a catalogue record and documented transmission. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q629858. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1996, 2010, 1994 and 1995.
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This entry incorporates text from “First Band on the Moon” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.