ABBA’s surprise singles I Still Have Faith in You and Don’t Shut Me Down add nothing particularly fresh or interesting to the legendary Swedish band’s storied discography. However, it would be premature to call their first new music in four decades as a cash-grab comeback mirroring Facebook-fueled school reunions, until I take in the full studio album Voyage slated for release on 5 November.
Released on Thursday, I Still Have Faith in You appears to be Voyage’s lead single, accompanied with a music video documenting ABBA’s history as trend setters in 1970s popular music and beyond.
Marked by soaring strings, vintage instrumentation, and simple functional lyrics essentially announcing a rebirth, I Still Have Faith in You is a ballad that perhaps could have been released at any point between the band’s breakup in 1982 and now.
It is also significantly superior to Don’t Shut Me Down, which, on multiple occasions, uses a sound effect uncannily reminiscent of the band’s 1976 classic Dancing Queen.
Despite having deeper, more personal lyrics, Don’t Shut Me Down sounds like it could be a previously shelved Dancing Queen B-side. Disco didn’t die, it just plagiarised itself to create a forgettable follow up, perhaps.
That being said, I am probably in the minority here, as the singles have racked up a combined 10 million views on YouTube, and social media has been dominated by people not only celebrating the Swedes’ surprise comeback, but also praising the new material.
“ABBA has released 2 brand new singles and announced a new album. They sound incredible. The new songs are pure Abba. I feel like I’m 28 again!,” said veteran director John Carpenter, known for his horror films like The Thing and Halloween.
ABBA has released 2 brand new singles and announced a new album. They sound incredible. The new songs are pure Abba. I feel like I'm 28 again!
— John Carpenter (@TheHorrorMaster) September 3, 2021
Several users also posted funny memes expressing their excitement, demanding a sequel to the ABBA-themed musical film Mamma Mia! and hyping up the return of the pioneering pop stars.
AN ABBA COMEBACK????????
IN MY LIFE TIME??????????? pic.twitter.com/rhNk1Lj7rZ
— Indi (@SkellyCat4) September 3, 2021
Me listening to the same two new ABBA songs until the full album is out pic.twitter.com/2naIp82HPN
— Hades ४ Waiting for ABBA Voyage ? WHAT IF ERA (@DHades88) September 2, 2021
new abba music means a new mamma mia movie someone call meryl streep
— Rio (@riomatt00) September 2, 2021
Regardless of how forgettable Voyage risks turning out to be, not even the most pretentious listeners can deny the impact Agnetha Fältskog, Björn Ulvaeus, Benny Andersson and Anni-Frid Lyngstad have had on popular music, as well as the extent to which they remained in the zeitgeist, internationally, for decades.
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Why are ABBA so popular?
Over the years, much has been written about the apparent mystery as to how four musicians from Stockholm managed to rise to immense stardom, even though its singers, Fältskog and Lyngstad, were considered as not being very fluent in English early on in their careers.
In part, the answer can be found if you peel back the layers behind an age-old truism of pop music: write and record memorable catchy hooks and the rest will take care of itself.
I first heard a version of this truism from the frontman of another Scandinavian pop group that didn’t exactly achieve a great deal of recognition in their home country of Denmark but dominated charts and airwaves in India and Asia in the 1990s and early 2000s. The frontman in question was Jascha Richter of Michael Learns to Rock (MLTR). When asked about the secret to his band’s success during a press conference in Manila, Richter famously quipped, “You got to have a chorus and a verse.”
This basic verse-chorus-verse structure applies to ABBA’s music as well, and so does the group’s professionalism to master a language not necessarily native to them. But it is the near-perfect production qualities that truly set them apart from the get go.
It also played its part in ensuring that ABBA’s work has continued to do well internationally in the age of Spotify while the likes of MLTR didn’t even within Asia, appearing as bygone as the Planet M and Music World shelves.
“Detail would be everything, and key to ABBA’s success was studio engineer Michael Tretow who created a form of double-tracking which duplicated the instruments and made the band sound enormous. Abba didn’t just have better songs. They sounded like nothing we’d heard before,” Andrew Harrison wrote for the BBC, citing Phil Spector’s ‘Wall of Sound’ production style.
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Appearances in popular culture and my listening experience
More significant than simply ABBA’s album sales or sold out world tours is their legacy. I was never a diehard fan of theirs, but even most of my favourite artists today, be it Opeth frontman Mikael Akerfeldt or Canada’s Devin Townsend, have either cited ABBA as musical influences or use the same ‘Wall of Sound’ production style that ABBA popularised.
As a result, even though I found some of ABBA’s albums to be fluff and repetitive, I have nothing but the utmost admiration for their immense talent and staying power in broader popular culture worldwide.
As such, my two favourite ABBA songs are those that not only appeared in a film and a television series, but were also crucial in either advancing the plot, enriching the characters or just creating memorable moments. While The Winner Takes it All ranks at the top due to its usage in an extended karaoke scene in Better Call Saul, Does Your Mother Know? was the centre of a hilarious sequence in the Rowan Atkinson film Johnny English.
Released 15 years apart, Better Call Saul and Johnny English are just two instances of the kind of cultural footprint ABBA has had, to the point that even the most skeptical listeners will end up demanding Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! more.
Views are personal.
(Edited by Anurag Chaubey)