London (AFP)
They have been separated for almost 40 years, leaving their fans inconsolable.
The legendary Swedish pop group ABBA promises for Thursday a "historic" surprise with, according to the press, new songs and a tour of their holograms, "ABBA-tars".
On Twitter, the four ABBA members - an anagram of their first names - Anni-Frid Lyngstad, 75, Agnetha Fältskog, 71, Björn Ulvaeus, 76, and Benny Andersson, 74, thanked their audiences for " patient "and mysteriously announced that" the journey was about to begin ".
They are dangling a "special" announcement on YouTube at 4:45 p.m. GMT, after having aroused public curiosity in recent days on social networks and through light panels scattered across London.
For the occasion, the Polydor record company is organizing an event in a tower in the east of the British capital.
According to The Sun, the band with the heady hits --Gimme!
Gimme!
Gimme!
(A Man After Midnight), Dancing Queen, Money, Money, Money - will be releasing new titles and planning a new show to debut next May in a specially designed 3,000-seat theater in east London .
- Hologram tour -
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 recorded: one called "I Still Have Faith in You" and the other "Don't Shut Me Down".
But the promise to release these new songs - the members of ABBA have since mentioned five songs in interviews - has been pushed back, then the Covid came to play the spoilsport.
A museum entirely dedicated to ABBA in Stockholm, in May 2013 JONATHAN NACKSTRAND AFP / Archives
A prominent figure in the gang of four, Björn Ulvaeus recently assured that titles would be available before the end of 2021.
"There will be new music this year, for sure, the question is no longer whether it could happen, it will happen," he said in May to the Australian daily The Herald Sun.
The group has also for years promised a tour of holograms, "ABBA-tars", the schedule of which should be specified Thursday.
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 Sixties, and started a planetary success after their triumph at Eurovision 1974 with their first tube "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 died: the group's best of ("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 70s.
Sign of the cult status of the group, "ABBA Gold" in July became the first record to stay 1000 weeks in the "charts" of British best sellers.
© 2021 AFP