The twins were born in Elverum on 21 February 2002 — Marcus first, by fifteen minutes — but Trofors is where they grew up and went to school. In 2012, aged ten, they won Melodi Grand Prix Junior with a song called "Two Drops of Water," which climbed to number eight on the Norwegian singles chart. What followed was five studio albums, a number one at home with "Girls" alongside Madcon, and a win on the Swedish edition of The Masked Singer in 2022, the first time a duo took that title outright.

Then came the Swedish detour. Melodifestivalen is Sweden's national institution, the selection contest that has run since the 1950s, and in 2024 two brothers from inland Helgeland won it with "Unforgettable" and represented Sweden in Malmö. They moved to Trondheim at the end of 2025. Villages of this size do not usually produce a Eurovision entry, and they almost never produce one for the neighbouring country.

Two rivers arrive at Trofors from different directions and leave as one. The Svenningdalselva comes up from the south, following the same corridor as the highway and the railway. The Austervefsna comes down from the east, out of Hattfjelldal and the high country near the Swedish border. Below their meeting point the water is called Vefsna — Vaapstenjeanoe in Southern Sámi — and it runs 163 kilometres to the fjord at Mosjøen, draining more than four thousand square kilometres and outranking every other river in Nordland.

The village name records the same fact in miniature. Fors is Norwegian for a rapid or waterfall, and the Southern Sámi form of the name is Trovvegarse. Twenty kilometres downstream the river gathers itself and drops about seventeen metres over Laksforsen, a wide ledge of a waterfall a few strides from the E6 that drew eighty thousand visitors in 2004 and has been the region's roadside spectacle ever since.

Laksforsen means salmon falls, and for most of a lifetime the name was aspirational. In the 1970s the Vefsna was infected with Gyrodactylus salaris, a tiny parasitic flatworm that fastens onto young salmon and kills them, and the river's famous runs collapsed. Ladders were shut to stop infected fish carrying the parasite further upstream. The treatment, when it finally came, was drastic: the whole watercourse dosed with rotenone in 2011 and 2012, killing the fish in order to kill what was killing the fish.

It worked. The Vefsna region was declared free of the parasite in the autumn of 2017. The ladder at Laksforsen was rebuilt for something like twenty million kroner and reopened in 2019, and fourteen ladders now give salmon access to close to 170 kilometres of spawning water. In 2022 the Vefsna produced the largest combined catch of salmon, sea trout and sea char of any river in the region — 7.59 tonnes. Two years earlier, in June 2009, parliament had put the entire watercourse under permanent protection, ending decades of hydropower plans.

Trofors exists because things meet here. The Nordland Line came through in 1940, the year the railway reached Mosjøen, and Trofors Station has been on the timetable since. The E6 runs past on its way north, and National Road 73 begins here, heading east through Hattfjelldal and on into Sweden — for a great deal of inland Helgeland, this junction is the way out in every direction. Mosjøen Airport, Kjærstad, is about forty minutes by car.

The work is wood. Grane's industry runs on sawmilling and wood processing, including a window factory, and forestry and agriculture together still account for a good share of local employment. The parish church stands a few kilometres north at Grane, which is where the municipality got its name. What Trofors has is the crossing itself: two rivers, a railway, two roads, and 860 people living at the point where all of them intersect.