ABBA returns with new album after a 40-year hiatus
“VOYAGE” WENT LIVE AT MIDNIGHT THURSDAY IN VARIOUS TIME ZONES, TO THE DELIGHT OF LONGTIME FANS WORLDWIDE.
STOCKHOLM: Swedish pop sensation ABBA made a comeback on Friday with their new album “Voyage”, nearly 40 years after they split up, with a digital avatar concert planned in London.
Agnetha, Bjorn, Benny and Anni-Frid -- forming the acronym ABBA -- have not released any new music since their split in 1982, a year after their last album “The Visitors”.
“Voyage” went live at midnight Thursday in various time zones, to the delight of longtime fans worldwide.
“We are just in disbelief... that it’s something that we could experience again in our lifetimes,” longtime ABBA fan Jeffrey de Hart, 62, said at a listening party in Stockholm for the Swedish band’s much-anticipated release.
Critics though were split on the return.
US magazine Rolling Stone hailed it as “worth the wait,” while the UK’s Guardian newspaper dismissed it with a “no thank you for the music”, reappropriating one of the group’s most famous songs.
After years of speculation and several dropped hints, the group finally announced the reunion and new album in September, and released the singles “I still have faith in you” and “Don’t shut me down”.
The 10-track “Voyage” is not all the group will be releasing.
They will also unveil digital avatars -- dubbed “ABBAtars” -at a concert in London in May, resembling their 1979 selves.
The group initially dreamed up the idea of avatars, and then the music followed suit.
By 2018, ABBA had confirmed rumours of their return to the studio and that at least two new songs were being recorded.
But great pains were taken to keep the music a secret.
“First it was just two songs, and then we said: ‘Well maybe we should do a few others’, what do you say girls and they said ‘Yeah’,” Benny Andersson, 74, explained when the album was announced.
“Then I asked them ‘why don’t we do a full album?’,” he added.
He and Bjorn Ulvaeus, 76, have been promoting the album in recent weeks, with 71-year-old Agnetha Faltskog and Anni-Frid Lyngstad, 75, opting to spare themselves from busy promotion schedules.
The newly released songs cannot escape being compared to hits like “Waterloo”, “Dancing Queen”, “Mamma Mia”, “The Winner Takes It All” and “Money, Money, Money”, but the band members are not worried about disappointing fans.
“We don’t have to prove anything, what does it matter if people think we were better before?” Andersson told Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter.
But “Voyage”, the band’s ninth studio album, will indeed be their last, the two Bs of the group confirmed in an interview with The Guardian at the end of October.