The Ark was formed by Ola Salo (at the time named "Svensson") in the small town of Rottne outside Växjö, Sweden in the summer of 1991.

At the age of fourteen, during a family vacation to Ireland, he wrote a poem in six lines with the title The Ark and got the idea to form a new band from this concept.

[2] The Ark's earliest repertoire consisted of covers of "My Generation" by The Who and "Honky Tonk Women" by The Rolling Stones, but also original songs written by Ola Salo such as "Only the Wind" and "Crumble and Fall".

The music was in a light-hearted and folky 60's style but the lyrics were dark and epic and the recurring theme was philosophy and religion, most notably about the World's ending with much inspiration from the Book of Revelation in the Christian Bible.

In 1992 the rock club Café Kristina released a double album to promote the local scene, and The Ark participated with the song "The Lamb".

[5] In the autumn of 1992 the band changed drummer, since Magnus Olsson had chosen a school that demanded much of his time on weekends and since he had also enlisted with the Swedish Home Guard.

[6] Ola Salo kept on writing songs with an apocalyptic and darkly philosophical theme, with titles such as "Merciful Sledge", "The World's Aflame", "Eucharist", "Rip It Out", "Up Against The Wall" and "My Sin".

But at the same time, The Ark wanted to break down the barriers between the art-kids who liked moody and heavy stuff and the kids who liked catchy pop.

It became a fan favourite in the band's live set and Ola Salo describes this song as "the biggest hit of The Ark's Apocalyptic Era".

[9] In March 1995 the band returned to Dundret studio and recorded two additional new songs: "I Laid It Down" and "Od Slatrom Ekil".

Ola Salo was inspired by this and decided to mix the superficial and seemingly plastic aspects of pop music with his heavy and deep themes.

Robert Jelinek gave the demos to Jon Gray who was well-established within the music industry and had his own publishing company called Mad House.

[19] They opened their set with the song "Laurel Wreath" and played soon-to-be hit singles such as "Let Your Body Decide", "Echo Chamber" and "It Takes A Fool To Remain Sane".

In the summer of 2001 the band played the largest stage of the Hultsfred Festival and teamed up with fellow Swedish pop acts Magnus Uggla and Håkan Hellström for a tour of 22 concerts across the country.

[22] The songs "Echo Chamber" (October 14, 2000) and "Joy Surrender" (April 2, 2001) were released as the third and fourth singles from the album, also to good success.

Ola Salo would later say, in the band's official biography No End from 2011, that he had intended to make a second album about lust, joy and happiness, but he was tired from the intense success of their breakthrough year and was not feeling very well, which he says can be heard on darker songs such as "A Virgin Like You" and "2000 Light-years Of Darkness.

Beginning in the first half of 2005, The Ark was to be launched in the United States and did much travelling to New York where they gained a small but dedicated audience.

A contributing reason was that the band had not been able to get their new American working visas before travelling to Washington, which meant that they had already been planned to go back to Sweden and get this done.

The main reason for cancelling the tour was that Ola Salo, who had quickly made an apology for the joke, was feeling totally burned out because of the scandal and was too tired to return.

[36] After the victory there were some newspaper articles discussing the song's similarities with "Love Grows (Where My Rosemary Goes)" by Edison Lighthouse, and the songwriter Barry Mason made a comment that he was thinking of suing The Ark.

Ola Salo went on a meditation trip to India, but the music that came to him was not the "Clamour For Glamour"-stompers the band had wished for, but simple country/folk-melodies that morphed into complicated symphonies.

[39] On May 8, 2009, Ola Salo invited the band to his home in order to present his vision of The Ark's upcoming psychedelic country/western-phase and the album Zeitgeist To The Lame.

Leari and Sylvester Schlegel showed great joy to the idea, but Ola Salo felt that the larger part of the band was hesitant.

Ola Salo had retrieved and updated the song "Superstar" that had been intended for "Prayer for the Weekend", and also "The Red Cap" which he had been working on earlier.

On June 29 the band appeared on the popular Swedish live show Allsång på Skansen, and on July 2 they did the first concert at the Peace & Love (festival).

Both the spring and the summer tour got very good reviews as well as sold-out shows, and the band once more received the Rockbjörnen Award for "Best Live Act".

The Ark did their final TV appearance on July 2 at Gröna Lund on TV4 (Sweden) with the songs "The Apocalypse Is Over" and "It Takes A Fool To Remain Sane".

A new greatest hits collection was released on double vinyl for the show, and the rest of the band all attended the premiere in Gothenburg together on January 24, 2019.

[54][55] The Ark made their first reunion performance on April 11, 2020, when playing "Calleth You, Cometh I" in an empty studio in Malmö during a televised charity gala on SVT in response to COVID-19.

Omar Rudberg sang a cover version of "It Takes a Fool to Remain Sane" for the Netflix show Young Royals.