Mamma Mia! Abba's back - from new music to a Voyage tour with VR 'Abba-tars', everything you need to know about the legendary pop band's comeback after a 39-year hiatus
It's been almost four decades since Abba, the iconic pop group made up of Agnetha Faltskog, Bjorn Ulvaeus, Benny Andersson and Anni-Frid Lyngstad, last performed on stage or wowed the world with new music. Many of us weren't even born when the group were at their peak, and yet the pure pop magic of Abba has been passed down from generation to ever-younger generation through blockbuster films Mamma Mia! The Movie in 2008 and Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again in 2018, as well as the stage show, also called Mamma Mia.
But now, if we're reading the signs correctly, the long silence from Abba is coming to an end - soon.
That's right, Abba, the music makers that got superstars like Meryl Streep, Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth, Cher, Julie Walters, Dominic Cooper, Amanda Seyfried and Christine Baranski to come together and release their inner dancing queens, are set to make a comeback with a smorgasbord of new music and even a virtual reality tour.
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Abba took the world by storm by winning the 1974 Eurovision Song Contest with their entry Waterloo, and went on to create a songbook that still garners newer and younger fans to this day. The foursome officially broke up in December 1982, and even though we thanked them for the music, diehard Abba-ficionados held out little hope of a reunion or new hits, especially after the group declined an offer of US$1 billion back in 2000 to reunite for a concert. Abba even told Billboard magazine in 2014: "You will never see us on stage again. We don't need the money, for one thing."
As of August 2021, the four members are each worth US$200-300 million, according to Celebrity Net Worth. So are they about to get even wealthier?
The last single ever recorded by Abba was Under Attack, marking the beginning of a 39-year silence and leaving us with nothing but well-played LPs and memories. Now Agnetha, Bjorn, Benny and Anni-Frid have heard our requests to Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! more Abba, and here's what we know so far about their much-anticipated comeback.
Something is happening next week
Word broke this week that new Abba tracks will drop as early as September 3. Although this hasn't been officially confirmed by the group or their representatives, a tantalising teaser has been posted on a new Twitter account @ABBAVoyage, with the bio: "Join us."
The inaugural tweet from the account was a pic of four gold rings, with the date September 2, 2021. The official website is equally cryptic, with little information other than encouraging fans to sign up to their newsletter.
New music has been in the pipeline since 2018
In 2018, Abba released a statement announcing that the group had reunited in the studio to record new music, set for a 2019 release. Fans young and old naturally went wild at this, since the band itself had not written, recorded or performed any new music in 39 years. Speaking at the premiere of Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, Ulvaeus spoke about two new songs set for release: I Still Have Faith in You and Don't Shut Me Down.
"One of them is a pop tune, very danceable. The other is more timeless, more reflective, that is all I will say. It is Nordic sad, but happy at the same time," Ulvaeus said. As if that wasn't enough, it was also announced that the group had actually recorded five new songs.
A digital reunion in Voyage: the virtual reality tour
At the same time, it was announced the group would be reuniting - sort of. Speaking to the Swedish publication Expressen, Andersson spilled plans for the group's soon-to-be announced "tour", saying: "We see each other every now and then, we've done a few different things, and now we've got a project ahead of us."
A virtual reality tour was being developed to debut in 2019, which would see the members appearing together in hologram form, dubbed "Abba-tars".
Details of the hologram tour are thin, but the word is that the group have been collaborating with Simon Fuller of American Idol to bring it to life. It was reported that similar technology that brought Tupac's hologram to Coachella in 2012 was being used to make the dreams of Abba fans come true. Talking about the development of the Abba-tars, Ulvaeus told The Times that the group were "photographed from all possible angles", adding: "They painted dots on our faces, they measured our heads."
The pandemic delayed the tracks and the tour
As with many things we were looking forward to over the last year and a half, the Covid-19 pandemic derailed the group's plans to release their new music as well as start their VR tour. There were also technical difficulties in bringing the digital versions of the four of them to life, much to the frustration of Abba fans the world over.
The host of the podcast Reasons To Be Cheerful, Geoff Lloyd, confirmed this, revealing: "I got to spend an hour with Bjorn Ulvaeus from Abba via Zoom. He's quarantining - he's got an island in the Stockholm archipelago. They've recorded five new songs. They should have been out at the end of last year. Because of technical difficulties and the pandemic, it's delayed things." However, Lloyd added, "He promised me that the new Abba music will be out in 2021."
This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (SCMP).
Copyright (c) 2021. South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.
