ABBA and Diana Ross | The return of the septuagenarians

(Paris) Friday is pop and disco night! After 40 and 22 years respectively without original compositions, ABBA and Diana Ross, successful machines, each come back with a new album.

ABBA has done things in a big way by announcing on September 2 in mondovision a disc (Trip) and a future show of digitized holograms, with “ABBAtars”.

The return of the Eurovision winners in 1974, with Waterloo, has toured the globe. The day before the release of the third single as a scout, Just A Notion, on October 22, the hashtag #ABBA already had 1.4 billion views on TikTok (2.2 billion this week).

To what do we owe this fervor for artists now in their seventies? “There is this image of happy days, carefree, colorful, sparkling, linked to their songs and their costumes, it recalls the 1970s, associated with a certain lightness that is lacking in the years 2010-2020”, dissects AFP Jean -Marie Potiez, official ABBA biographer for French-speaking countries.

“Me, it takes me back to the 1970s, to this excitement that I felt when I arrived at my record store in Belgium to discover their records”, continues the author of the recent A teenager from the 70s (My life with ABBA), work published by Olaa.

a Trip in the timeshare by many fans, like John Carpenter, the horror / fantasy film master (Halloween, The Thing, New York 1997, etc.) who tweeted on September 3, “They sound amazingly good. The new songs are pure ABBA. I am 28 years old again! “.

“Depth, sensitivity”

Jean-Marie Potiez finds him “the voices of Agnetha and Anni-Frid, who have lost in the treble, which is normal given their age, but have gained in depth, in sensitivity”. “When they sing together, both of them, as on Don’t shut me down (released on September 2), this is the ABBA sound ”.

The influence of the Swedes with 400 million sales (all media and formats combined, CDs, vinyls and cassettes, equivalent sales in streaming, singles and albums) has never wavered over the decades.

Clara Luciani, face of a radiant French disco-pop, “listened to ABBA thoroughly during the composition of her last album and asked her arrangers for a sound similar to that of ABBA”, underlines Jean-Marie. Potiez.

“We must not leave more than 40 years between each album”, had ironied on September 2 Björn Ulvaeus, thinking head of the quartet, author of the standards Dancing Queen Where Money Money Money.

For Diana Ross, interpreter of the indestructible Upside Down and I’m coming out, the wait will have been half as long. His last record of original songs dates back 22 years (Every Day Is A New Day, 1999; 2006 album I love you was built on covers).

“They still have the catch”

So here it is with Thank you, album which sounds more dancing (even if it also includes ballads) and more anchored in its time than what ABBA has let filter so far.

This modernity, far from the nostalgia coating the titles of ABBA, undoubtedly owes to one of the producers credited, Jack Antonoff. This American is in a state of grace, turning everything he touches into gold, like the two jewels of Lana Del Rey albums, Norman Fucking Rockwell! and Chemtrails Over The Country Club.

“I dedicate these love songs to all listeners. When you hear my voice, you hear my heart, ”says Diana Ross in her intent notes.

In her distant duel with ABBA, the disco diva leaves with a length of delay, with a very discreet promotion far from the heavy artillery of the Scandinavians.

Will she manage to reconnect with past successes? Recall that she placed 43 singles in No. 1 of the charts, solo or with The Supremes, with more than 100 million albums sold in total.

“At 77, she is back at the age of ABBA members, it is the return of grandpas and grandmothers, but apparently they still have the fishing”, laughs Jean-Marie Potiez.