A few years ago, Swedish pop legends ABBA announced they had reformed and were working on new music to be released imminently. The project was to be tied into a virtual experience, and we eventually heard they were working on more than just one or two songs.
In a livestream on Thursday afternoon, the band finally announced the fruits of those sessions and it’s more than just a couple songs for a virtual reality program: Voyage, their first new album since 1981’s The Visitors, will be released on November 5 through Capitol Records. ABBA also released two new singles, “I Still Have Faith In You” and “Don’t Shut Me Down.” Two other songs on the album, “Just a Notion” and “Bumblebee,” had been demoed by the band in the 1970s, and snippets of both had appeared in a medley of unreleased songs in the Thank You for the Music box set in 1994.
Voyage will consist of ten songs, those two singles plus eight more tracks. While the album is the first new ABBA full-length in 40 years, the band last released new music in 1982, when they issued two final singles—the critically lauded “The Day Before You Came” and their farewell “Under Attack”—for the greatest hits album The Singles: The First Ten Years.
The release of Voyage will also be accompanied by that virtual reality hologram concert project that ABBA had also been working on since 2018. According to the BBC, the holograms, or “ABBA-tars,” were designed by Industrial Light & Magic and will make their debut at a concert in London next spring in a specifically-built arena where the digital avatars will subsequently perform six nights a week. The avatars are previewed in the “I Still Have Faith in You” video.
Watch the videos for “I Still Have Faith in You” and “Don’t Shut Me Down” below. And let us know in the comments what you think of the first new ABBA songs in four decades in the comments.
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