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Abba 2021
Photo:
Industrial Light And / dpa
There are bands that have been around for a long time, constantly releasing new albums and playing live until they seem like they can hardly do it anymore.
Feels non-stop.
And often not to their advantage.
Abba are not that kind of band.
Agnetha Fältskog, Anni-Frid Lyngstad, Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson - now all in their seventies - took a kind of break for almost 40 years: in the early eighties they declared Abba over - and left behind glittering, high-contrast, flared-free images from the seventies of themselves who have burned themselves into the collective memory of pop.
Pictures of four young, pretty good-humored Swedes.
Meanwhile, mythical images that most people have in mind when they hear the acronym Abba, which is made up of the names of the four.
Sounds totally over the top - for any normal band
Now they have announced their comeback as Abba, in a live stream of about an hour on YouTube.
With two new songs from a whole new album due out on November 5th.
That was the first part of the message that would have been enough to write "Sensation" over it.
The second part: The reunited Abba let the Abba from 1979 appear as holograms in a specially built London arena.
Sounds megalomaniac.
Totally over it.
For every normal band.
But we're talking about Abba.
From over 400 million albums sold.
From "Dancing Queen", "Super Trouper" and "Money, Money, Money".
From countless hits, actually from one big hit typewriter.
Is it still possible?
The moderators, who lead through the live stream in Stockholm and London, emphasize again and again that it is about something big, huge, monumental.
"Big" and "fabulous" is everything when the stream has just started and you as a viewer are still watching waiting viewers, so you don't even know what is supposed to be "big" and "fabulous".
Fans from Vienna, Tokyo or Reykjavík are shown singing "Mamma Mia" crookedly and charmingly into the camera, mainly young people who declare that they love Abba.
A music journalist explains the Abba phenomenon.
And then a moderator explains that the moment has now come that everyone has been waiting for.
Oh I see.
Lots of explanations that it didn't really need.
But voltage is capitalized on this stream, VOLTAGE.
Like ABBA.
The first new song sounds, "I Still Have Faith In You". A ballad carried by the piano and the beautifully aged Abba voices, which gradually increases to the size of the stadium, drums, electric guitar and something that might be hope. It sounds like it was written on a hit typewriter and, unlike the second premiere, "Don't Shut Me Down", is more inclined to the dramatic gesture than the dance moves. There are two quite opposite pieces that actually fulfill the goal that they are supposed to fulfill in the stream: to make you want to see the whole album, »Voyage«.
Especially "Don't Shut Me Down" is reminiscent of the old Abba.
And not to a currently popular musician like Drake, for example.
He doesn't understand how the Canadian superstar, one of these “modern pop artists”, does his stuff, says Benny Andersson at some point in the stream.
He doesn't have to either.
He sits next to Björn Ulvaeus, both dressed in timelessly elegant black, and is asked questions.
Answers from an understatement manual
What's the best part about being part of Abba?
The money.
What can you expect from "Voyage"?
A couple of pop songs.
Answers like from an understatement manual for elderly pop stars who no longer have to prove anything.
Abba don't have to be on stage either, they now have the holograms for that: 160 cameras would have filmed today's Abba to reconstruct the 1979 Abba on the computer, the stream tells.
The sequence in which the result is shown, which looks terrifyingly real, lasts a few minutes.
And, at first glance, maybe just terrifying.
On the shelf of the great-uncle and at the Abi party
So you may at least first come up with the idea of reviving a younger version of yourself as a hologram during your lifetime. Basically, it is not so much a question of lifetimes, but of the larger than life, the stopping of time, the preservation of youth, pressing on pause. After all, many older listeners associate their youth with Abba. Forever young, it's one of the promises of pop music, and Abba seem to have found a way to deliver on that.
In addition, Abbas music - this is shown not only by the young people in the live stream who profess their Abba love, but also by the number of views on Spotify - for a pop music canon that seems almost timeless.
Which is taken through in school lessons, as a record on the shelf of the great-uncle and is still allowed to run at the Abiparty.
Which successfully defies taste categories, and now, with the holograms, even space and time.
Who is allowed to do that?
Nobody is allowed to do that.
But we're talking about Abba.