Starting in a custom-built London venue next May, the group will perform as highly sophisticated avatars (or in this case, Abbatars) designed to replicate their 1979 look—the era of feathered hair and flamboyant stage wear
Benny Andersson, left, and Bjorn Ulvaeus in Andersson’s Stockholm studio, Oct. 22, 2021. One of the biggest pop groups in the world secretly reunited to make a new album and created a high-tech stage show featuring digital avatars of themselves — from 1979. (Felix Odell/The New York Times)
STOCKHOLM — The small, tranquil island of Skeppsholmen holds a handful of the Swedish capital’s artistic treasures: Moderna Museet, the theater group Teater Galeasen and the converted red brick warehouse just steps from a waterfront promenade where Benny Andersson has his personal studio. He tucked a packet of the oral tobacco snus in his mouth as Bjorn Ulvaeus sipped coffee in one of its sunbathed rooms earlier this month, the two musicians surrounded by a grand piano, a small selection of synths and an assortment of framed photographs that were perched behind a computer screen.
For the first time since the Reagan administration, the pair were discussing a new album by their band, Abba — an album one of the biggest international pop acts in history somehow made in secret, with all four of its original members congregating nearly four decades after giving their last public performance.
“We took a break in the spring of 1982 and now we’ve decided it’s time to end it,” the group said in a statement in September. The response was thunderous. “Abba is another vessel, isn’t it?” Ulvaeus marveled at the studio, just steps from the larger one where they completed their clandestine LP. “We did this thing and we are on the front page of every paper in the world.”
In a country known for producing towering figures in pop music (Avicii, hitmaker Max Martin, Robyn, Roxette) Abba still looms the largest, and even has its own permanent museum. Between 1973 and 1981, the quartet — which includes singers Agnetha Faltskog and Anni-Frid Lyngstad — released eight studio albums filled with meticulously crafted melodies, harmonies and strings that have generated 20 hits on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart, sold tens of millions of albums around the world and built a passionate fan base.
But its paradigm-shifting impact can’t be measured only in numbers: The group was known for taking risks with technology and the use of its songs. Starting in the mid-1970s, it was among the first acts to make elaborate promotional mini-films — we’d call them music videos now — most of them directed by Lasse Hallstrom. Its 1981 album “The Visitors” is generally acknowledged as the first commercial release on compact disc. The 1999 jukebox musical “Mamma Mia!” paired the group’s hits with an unrelated plot, sparking a slew of imitators and two film adaptations that brought us the spectacle of Meryl Streep singing “Dancing Queen.”
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