Mamma mia, here we go again! ABBA to reunite for virtual concert residency, first album in 40 years
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Mamma mia, here we go again! Fans are about to gimme, gimme, gimme ABBA all their money, money, money, as the Eurovision-winning pop stars have just announced that they are about to release their first studio album in 40 years.
The 10-track album, ABBA Voyage, will be released on Nov. 5, and the new songs will also be performed during a virtual concert residency that will open at a custom-built arena in East London on May 27, 2022. The “revolutionary” show, also titled “ABBA Voyage,” will run six nights a week and will feature ABBA holograms — cleverly known as “ABBAtars” — and a 10-piece live band playing 22 of the Swedish superstars’ greatest hits.
The ABBAtars were designed by Industrial Light and Magic (the visual effects company founded by George Lucas), and more than 850 people employed motion-capture technology to recreate band members Agnetha Fältskog, Björn Ulvaeus, Benny Andersson, and Anni-Frid Lyngstad’s “every mannerism and every motion” from when they were “in their prime.”
“Agnetha, Frida, Benny, and Bjorn got onstage in front of 160 cameras and almost as many VFX geniuses, and they performed every song in this show, to perfection, over five weeks,” producer Ludvig Andersson explained during a globally streamed press conference that took place Thursday at the AcerlorMittal Orbit in London’s Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park.
Two songs off ABBA Voyage — the group’s first full-length LP since 1981’s The Visitors, which came out as the quartet’s two married couples were getting divorced — premiered during Thursday’s press event. The effervescent “Don’t Shut Me Down” is a classic ABBA story-song in the vein of “The Day Before You Came,” while the earnest, nostalgic piano ballad “I Still Have Faith In You” is an ode to the bond that the four bandmates still share after all these years. A particularly goosebump-raising moment of that song is when Fältskog and Lyngstad trill in their signature heavenly harmonies, “You asked me not to leave/Well, here I am again/And I love you still.”