ABBA delights fans but divides criticism

(Stockholm) ABBA makes a comeback on Friday with a new album Trip after forty years of silence from Swedish disco-pop legends, an opus that delights its millions of fans but leaves criticism more divided.

Since their de facto separation at the end of 1982, a year after their last album The Visitors, Agnetha, Björn, Benny and Anni-Frid (acronym ABBA) had no longer released songs and put away their famous kitsch costumes in the locker room.

The announcement in early September of their reformation, during an XXL ceremony toured in several capitals, had gone around the world, after years of speculation.

Composed of ten titles, Trip is the unforeseen fruit of a project on which ABBA has been working for years: a concert of “revolutionary” digital avatars, supposed to relegate to the shelf of junk the holograms that have flourished in recent years in the world of music.

An “ABBA Arena” is under construction in London to host the show from the end of May 2022.

Certain points remain mysterious, but one thing is clear: it is the ABBAs of today that we will hear singing, but their “ABBAtars” will represent them with their physique of… 1979.

It was by preparing this project in partnership with a special effects company of the father of Star Wars George Lucas – often delayed by technical difficulties, then by COVID-19 – that the idea of ​​making music together was born. .

As early as 2018, ABBA had confirmed the rumors of his return to the studio and it was known that the recording of at least two new songs was kept safe from prying ears.

“At first it was only two songs, and then we said to each other. “Maybe we could do a few more […] and then I asked, ‘What if we do a full album? ‘Benny Andersson, 74, explained when the album was announced.

He and Björn Ulvaeus, 76, have been promoting it in recent weeks, Agnetha Fältskog and Anni-Frid Lyngstad having chosen to spare themselves this event at 71 and 75 spring respectively.

Always the “ABBA sound”

Three of the ten songs on the album, available since midnight local time in all countries of the world, had already been unveiled: first I Still Have Faith In You and Don’t shut me down. Then a modernized version of Just A Notion, recorded in 1978, but never published so far.

Waterloo, Dancing Queen, Mamma mia, The Winner Takes It All, Money Money Money : will the new delivery not suffer from the comparison with the golden age?

“We don’t have to prove anything – what if people think we were better before? », Kicked Benny Andersson in an interview with the Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter.

Critics are divided: some like the magazine Rolling Stone salute a success “which deserved to wait”, when the Guardian currying out the album of a cruel ” No thank you for the music »Pasticant one of the group’s successes. Many agree, however, on the uneven level of livery.

For Jean-Marie Potiez, one of the best international experts in the group, “Agnetha and Anni-Frid’s voices have lost their treble, which is normal given their age, but have gained in depth and sensitivity”.

“When they sing together, both of them, as on Don’t shut me down, this is the ABBA sound ”.

On social networks, the fans mostly show their enthusiasm.

“It’s the ABBA sound, but it’s not nostalgic, not stuck in what they were. It corresponds to who they are today ”, greets a Swedish fan met by AFP, Peter Palmquist.

Satisfaction is shared by record stores. “This is probably the biggest launch I’ve worked on. I’ve been working in this store for ten years and I’ve never seen anything like it, ”Samuel Hägglund told AFP while shelving his shop in central Stockholm.

Hilde, a Norwegian fan who has come to pick up the long-awaited record in the store, does not hesitate for a second when asked if she is moved. “I’ve waited 40 years for this moment, so yes,” she says.

Corn Trip, the group’s ninth studio album, will indeed be the last, confirmed the two “B’s” in an interview with Guardian end of October.