ABBA is releasing its first new music in four decades, along with a concert performance that will see the “Dancing Queen” quartet going entirely digital.
The forthcoming album “Voyage,” to be released Nov. 5, is a follow-up to 1981′s “The Visitors,” which until now had been the swan song of the Swedish supergroup. And a virtual version of the band will begin a series of concerts in London on May 27.
“We took a break in the spring of 1982 and now we’ve decided it’s time to end it,” ABBA said in a statement Thursday. “They say it’s foolhardy to wait more than 40 years between albums, so we’ve recorded a follow-up to ‘The Visitors.’”
The group has been creating the live show with George Lucas’ special-effects company, Industrial Light & Magic. They say the virtual versions of themselves are “weird and wonderful,” and go beyond holograms.
“It was suggested to us that we could go on tour as a hologram. And this is now four, five years ago,” Björn Ulvaeus, ABBA’s 76-year-old guitarist, backup singer and co-songwriter said at a news conference Thursday. “And we found out very soon that that wasn’t even possible because holograms is an old technology, but I mean, the vision was there of having our digital selves, that even was a possibility.”
“And also,” said Benny Andersson, 74, who plays keyboards, sings and writes songs with Ulvaeus, “we want to do it before we were dead.”