ABBA thrills fans with comeback album, show

NEARLY four decades after disbanding and vowing never to get back together, Swedish superstars ABBA on Thursday announced a musical comeback with a new album and a London show featuring their performances captured by digital avatars.

ABBA notched up over 400 million album sales over 50 years despite parting ways in 1982 and resolutely resisting all offers to work together again – until now.

“We have made a new album with ABBA!” the band’s Bjorn Ulvaeus, 76, and Benny Andersson, 74, announced via a video presentation in London.

The other group members are Anni-frid Lyngstad, 75, and Agnetha Faltskog, 71.

“The album is in the can now, it’s done,” said Andersson.

“It’s been 40 years, or 39, it was like no time had passed. It was quite amazing,” he said.

“We’ve done as good as we could at our age.”

The album will come out on November 5, the musicians said, with the show expected in May 2022.

The now septuagenarian stars of pop classics such as Dancing Queen, The Winner Takes It All and Take a Chance on Me, last recorded new music together in the 1980s. The pop maestros had a string of hits in the 1970s and early 1980s after winning Eurovision in 1974 with Waterloo.

The show will feature 22 songs, mostly the group’s classic hits, and last 90 minutes, the musicians said, with tickets going on sale later this month.

The group broke up in 1982 by which time both of the quartet’s married couples were divorced.

They long steered clear of a reunion despite their music’s enduring popularity, fuelled by a hit compilation album in 1992, the Mamma Mia musical and later spin-off films starring Meryl Streep, Colin Firth and Pierce Brosnan.

“There is simply no motivation to regroup. Money is not a factor and we would like people to remember us as we were,” Ulvaeus said in a 2008 interview.