Fans have been waiting for such an event since ABBA broke up in 1982. The legendary Swedish pop group unveiled a new original album on Thursday September 2nd and announced a tour of their holograms, "ABBA-tars".

The performers of "Dancing Queen", "Waterloo" and "Money Money Money", to the mega-success in the years 1970, prolonged by retrospective albums, a musical and films, thus concretized a return promised for years.

During an event for fans broadcast on the Internet from Stockholm, London, Berlin or New York, a song from the new album was broadcast: "I Still Have Faith in You" ("I still believe in you").

The ballad video shows archival footage of the four ABBA members - an acronym made up of the initials of their first names - Anni-Frid Lyngstad, 75, Agnetha Fältskog, 71, Björn Ulvaeus, 76, and Benny Andersson, 74.

"We made a new album," announced Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson from London at the time.

It will be released on November 5.

"We must not leave more than 40 years between each album", quipped Björn Ulvaeus, specifying that the one to come included "a mixture of what (the group) had done, and a Christmas carol".

The group with heady hits and mythical seventies outfits will also launch a new show for the occasion, which will be presented next May in a 3,000-seat theater specially designed for the occasion in east London.

It will consist of 22 songs and will unfold their hits in an hour and a half, interpreted by improved holograms presenting them young.

A discreet life since the separation of the group

In April 2018, the ex-group announced that they had returned to the studio for the first time in nearly four decades.

Two songs were then recorded: "I Still Have Faith in You" and "Don't Shut Me Down".

"We had these two songs, it felt light to us and we thought, why not do some more? We did some more and it was good, so we went on and recorded an album. full, ”Benny Andersson explained on Swedish public television SVT.

The release of these new titles has continued to be postponed, then the Covid-19 pandemic has come to play the spoilsport.

For the Swede Carl Magnus Palm, specialist of the group, the choice to use digital avatars for the show delayed the comeback of the legendary pop group. "They had problems with the technology, it didn't really go as they had hoped. And so there was a delay because of that," he told AFP. "They were finally ready to go about a year ago, but the pandemic has struck," he also explained.

If they all continued more or less active solo careers, the four Scandinavians had essentially led a discreet life since the separation of the group, which had shortly followed the divorce of Fältskog and Ulvaeus and that of Andersson and Lyngstad. The four friends had met at the end of the 1960s and had started a worldwide success after their triumph at Eurovision 1974 with their first hit, "Waterloo".

Since their last studio album in 1981 and their split in 1982, the legendary pop group with tens of millions of albums sold has not released any new tracks.

But the flame never really went out: the best of the group ("ABBA Gold") released in 1992 has become one of the best-selling records in the world.

The musical "Mamma Mia" and the films made from it attracted new fans who were not born during the heyday of the 1970s.

Sign of the cult status of the group, "ABBA Gold" in July became the first record to stay 1,000 weeks in the "charts" of British best sellers.

With AFP

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