If you thought Broken Lizard’s recent revival was the only Super Trooper sequel coming your way, get ready to be happy: Swedish musical supergroup ABBA have announced their first new music in 35 years.
The quartet, who have sold hundreds of millions of records around the globe with hits like Dancing Queen, Mamma Mia, and Take A Chance On Me, took to Instagram to share the news, announcing that they have hit the recording studio for the first time since they disbanded in 1983. The band recorded two new singles, both for a worldwide tour in which they will be depicted by some sort of holograms (or Pepper’s Ghost, or some sort of projected iteration).
Yes, that’s right: ABBA recorded new music, and they’ll tour as freaking holograms in 2019.
“The decision to go ahead with the exciting Abba avatar tour project had an unexpected consequence,” said the band in a statement, “We all felt that, after some 35 years, it could be fun to join forces again and go into the recording studio. So we did. And it was like time had stood still and we had only been away on a short holiday. An extremely joyful experience!”
Apart from the two new singles, the centerpiece of the new hologram-based project — which sees the band digitally “de-aged” to look the same age as they did for their third and final tour in 1979 — will be a two-hour TV special.
Co-produced by NBC and the BBC, the special will showcase the band’s classic hits as well as one of the new songs, called I Still Have Faith In You. The name of the second song has yet to be released by the band. The show will debut in December.
This isn’t the first time that the Swedish pop band has adapted their music for stage and screen. The band’s musical Mamma Mia! debuted in London in 1999 and is still running worldwide, having been seen by 60 million people in 440 cities, according to the band’s website. In 2008, the show was made into a film that grossed over $600 million worldwide. The sequel to the 2008 film, Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again, will be released in June, and features an all-star cast that includes Lily James, Meryl Streep, Amanda Seyfried, and Colin Firth.
Long revered as one of the most important bands in the history of pop music, ABBA are famed in music production circles for their extremely catchy songwriting. Legendary songwriters like Swedish producer Max Martin, who has crafted perhaps the largest catalog of global hits in the past two decades, have often cited the band as a significant influence.
Between the TV special, new film, and two new songs, there’s a lot for longtime fans of the band to be excited about.
