Forty years after the bitter songs written in the wake of ABBA band members’ divorces for their last album, 1981’s The Visitors, the Swedish pop band is back with a new album titled Voyage.
The highly anticipated album of brand new songs will be released on November 5. Two tracks from it, the epic ballad I Still Have Faith in You and the shimmying Don’t Shut Me Down, are out now.
The group members, Benny Andersson, Agnetha Fältskog, Anni-Frid Lyngstad and Björn Ulvaeus, have also announced a new concert in London beginning in May 2022. Digital versions of themselves, “avatars”, will appear nightly alongside a 10-piece live band at a new 3,000-capacity venue in the city’s Olympic park, called the Abba Arena.
The concept of the “Abba-tars,” first came about in 2016 and was designed by visual effects company Industrial Light and Magic, founded by “Star Wars” creator George Lucas.
The reunion also brings two pairs of once-married couples back together. Lyngstad and Andersson were engaged in 1971, the same year that Fältskog and Ulvaeus married, but by 1981, both couples had divorced within a year of each other. Their broken love life was explored with great anguish in songs such as The Winner Takes It All, and in the psychodramas of their final album in 1981.
Long before the music and movies, ABBA’s song catalog was already one of the most successful in all pop music. Having formed in 1972, at the height of their fame in the mid-1970s six out of seven singles in a row reached No 1 in the UK: Fernando, Mamma Mia, Dancing Queen, Knowing Me Knowing You, Name of the Game and Take a Chance on Me.
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