The secret is out! After a baffling ABBA tweet and days of suspense for fans, the Swedish cult band announced a new album after their 40-year hiatus and a stage show to boot.
The album Journey will have 10 new songs. Two of them, “I Still Have Faith in You” and “Don’t Turn Me Off,” can now be streamed. The album is released on November 5, 2021.
“First we did one song, then several. Then we said, why don’t we make a whole record?” said ABBA member Björn Ulvaeus.
Returns as holograms
And that’s not all. Fans of the legendary pop group will once again be able to enjoy the quartet on stage next spring in a show at the specially built stadium at Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in London, at least practically.
Agnetha, Björn, Benny and Anni-Frid will not be on stage in person, but as holograms of their younger selves, what they call ABBAatars.
The images are incredibly realistic thanks to sophisticated technology. Over the course of five weeks, the band members performed each song on 160 cameras, recording all the movements to create the virtual images. “The only big problem was that we had to shave our beards,” Björn said.
Earlier, ABBA announced a “historic live broadcast” on Twitter, which had caused much speculation.
In fact, the ABBA fan community had to be patient for a long time. The Swedes first announced a “digital entertainment experience” scheduled for 2016, but it was postponed several times, most recently due to the coronavirus pandemic.
For a long time it was thought that the meeting was impossible
ABBA was part of the “superleague of the music business,” writes music historian Carl Magnus Palm in ABBA: Story and Songs Compact. They have sold at least 380 million albums since their advance at the 1974 Eurovision Song Contest (ESC), some estimates even put it at 500 million records. After the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, Björn, Benny, Agnetha and Anni-Frid, whose initials are the name of the group, are the most successful band of all time.
Its successes are evergreen. “Waterloo”, “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)”, “The Winner Takes It All” and many other songs from his eight studio albums appeared on charts around the world.
Despite personal crises between the band members and a hiatus that began in 1982 and lasted four decades, their music remains a commercial success. To date, ABBA is said to have made a profit of about 2 billion euros ($ 2.4 billion).
For a long time, a reunion seemed remote, as the four members of the band categorically refused to reunite. In 2000 they turned down a € 1 billion world tour offer.
Media report on a new tour
The #ABBAVoyage tweet fueled the debate over a possible comeback. The band had hinted that there were new songs in the process.
In 2018, Björn said that ABBA was recording two songs, “I Still Have Faith In You” and “Don’t Shut Me Down”, according to the British NME magazine. The release date remained vague until May 2021, when Björn said the new songs will be released this year, NME reported, in turn referring to the Australian Herald Sun..
ABBA were known for their interesting stage costumes
Speculation was made on social media. In 2017, Benny hinted at the Daily Telegraph that the band would tour again after a quarter of a century, not in person, but putting “ABBAtars” on stage: holograms of the band members frozen in their 1970s looks.
The end of a myth?
Despite her break, ABBA never disappeared. Björn and Benny wrote musicals that were held in the West End of London or on Broadway in New York. Oh Mom! it has thrilled more than 60 million visitors since its release in 1999 and became a film in 2008 with Meryl Streep and Pierce Brosnan. It is considered one of the most successful musicals in history. With their versions, popular performers like Cher and Erasure also put ABBA songs back on the lyrics lists over and over again.
ABBA songs are also important to the LGBTQ community and in 2010, 28 years after their last studio recordings, they were included in the legendary Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The ABBA legend continues.
This article has been translated from German.