By Prisca Sam-Duru

They ruled the world of authentic music prior to their splitting as a group, but their songs never stopped making a desirable impact on their listeners.

 It’s no longer news that the celebrated Swedish super-pop group, ABBA, is back after four decades of interruption in their relationship as a musical group. The exciting thing about their return is that it’s not about photo ops or interviews but, the quartet is ready to shake the music space once again with a brand-new album titled “Voyage”, to be released on November 5 this year.

The group which split in 1982 is back with two singles, “I Still Have Faith” and “Don’t Shut Me Down” and is ready for series of digital concerts on May 27, 2022 at Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park’s arena in London.

ABBA, founded with the initials of Agnetha Faltskog and Bjorn Ulvaeus, together with Benny Andersson and Anni-Frid Lyngstad who were couples then, sold over 300 million albums. One of their hit songs, “Waterloo”, brought them to the limelight after it won the Swedish branch of the Eurovision Song Contest on February 9,1974.

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“Waterloo”, together with other hits, “The Winner Takes it All” and “Take a Chance on Me” saw the group topping charts from Australia to America for a long time. Their music has remained ever-present in the years following their breakup, thanks to the stage musical, ‘Mamma Mia!’ as well as the two films that followed it.

In 2010, they were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. And few days ago, the band launched a website with the title ‘ABBA Voyage’, through which they’ve been reaching out to their fans across the globe. The choice of London for the concerts according to Bjohn Ulvaeus, ABBA’s 76-year-old guitarist, backup singer and co-songwriter, was because “Somehow, we have always felt that the Brits see us as their own – it feels like that when we come here every time”. The group, said to have been “creating the live show with George Lucas’ special-effects company, Industrial Light & Magic, disclosed that the virtual versions of themselves are “weird and wonderful,” and go beyond holograms”.

The forthcoming album, ‘Voyage’ by the ‘Dancing Queen’ quartet to be released November 5, is a “follow-up to 1981’s ‘The Visitors’, which until now had been the swan song of the Swedish super-group”. “We took a break in the spring of 1982 and now we’ve decided it’s time to end it. They say it’s foolhardy to wait more than 40 years between albums, so we’ve recorded a follow-up to ‘The Visitors'”, ABBA said in a statement.

“It was suggested to us that we could go on tour as a hologram. And this is now four, five years ago, and we found out very soon that that wasn’t even possible because hologram is an old technology, but I mean, the vision was there of having our digital selves, that even was a possibility”, Bjorn Ulvaeus, said at a news conference.

Benny Andersson, 74, who plays keyboards, sings and writes songs with Ulvaeus added: “We want to do it before we were dead”, stressing that “It’s good if you do that before you’re dead, because it gets more accurate then.”

Since their reunion, they’ve sang and played together for hours every day for weeks, using motion capture and other techniques to create the songs. The show, coming fifty years after the founding of the group, encouraged the making of the album, which features the two new singles, ‘I Still Have Faith in You’ and ‘Don’t Shut Me Down’.

It began with sessions in 2018 and was delayed by the corona virus pandemic. “It was so joyful to be together in the studio again, the four of us,” Andersson said”.

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