ABBA – Glitter with a fracture

Eurovision to Waterloo to the divorce years

ABBA formed in Stockholm in 1972 from two couples: Bjorn Ulvaeus and Agnetha Faltskog, and Benny Andersson and Anni-Frid Lyngstad. Ulvaeus and Andersson had both been members of successful Swedish pop acts in the 1960s and had been writing songs together since 1966. The women were already established performers in Scandinavia. The four began working together as a unit in earnest after Bjorn and Agnetha married in 1971, with an ambition that was simultaneously local and international from the outset.

The Eurovision Song Contest in April 1974 was the moment that made the international ambition concrete. ‘Waterloo’ won the contest in Brighton with a performance that kept the costumes, the staging and the chorus in the same three minutes. The song reached number one in the UK and broke into the American market in a way that Swedish pop acts had not previously managed. It also established the core of what ABBA would spend the next eight years refining: a production approach informed by Phil Spector’s layered sounds, Beach Boys harmonies, and European schlager tradition, with melodies clear enough to travel outside Sweden, as Waterloo had just done.

Polar Music Studios in Stockholm became the primary recording site, with Andersson as the principal composer and arranger, Ulvaeus handling much of the English lyric writing with input from manager Stig Anderson. The sound built up in layers: piano and synthesizer foundations, densely overdubbed vocals using Agnetha and Anni-Frid in combinations that exploited the contrast between their voices, string and horn arrangements added systematically. Engineers including Michael B. Tretow worked out compression and equalization choices that made the records sound warm and precise at the same time.

The peak commercial period ran from Arrival (1976) through The Album (1977) and Voulez-Vous (1979). ‘Dancing Queen,’ ‘Fernando,’ ‘Knowing Me Knowing You,’ ‘The Name of the Game,’ ‘Chiquitita,’ ‘Voulez-Vous,’ ‘Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)’: each single was built with the kind of detail other acts often saved for a last track. The arrangements do not repeat one formula. Tempo, instruments and the mood of the lyric change from song to song, from Dancing Queen through Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! The vocal layers of Agnetha and Anni-Frid, and the melodies, are what stay.

The private splits became easier to hear in the songs as the decade went on. Agnetha and Bjorn announced their separation in 1979; Benny and Anni-Frid divorced in 1981. The songs that emerged during and after this period, ‘The Winner Takes It All’ (1980), ‘One of Us’ (1981), ‘The Day Before You Came’ (1982), do not hide what they are about. ‘The Winner Takes It All’ is particularly direct, written by Andersson and Ulvaeus and delivered by Agnetha with a controlled precision that makes the link to the breakup hard to miss. The group continued as professional partners while the private lives were coming apart. The later records were made in that stretch, with the four of them still in the studio.

ABBA disbanded effectively in 1982 without a formal announcement. Through the 1980s and 1990s the catalogue found a second life in compilations, the stage musical Mamma Mia (1999) and its film adaptations, and a persistent critical revaluation that placed the production techniques alongside those of the best American pop craftsmen of the period. The ABBA Gold compilation, released in 1992, became one of the best-selling albums in history across several markets, The sales showed the records were still being bought long after the reviews of the 1970s.

Voyage (2021) brought new material for the first time in forty years, accompanied by the ABBA Voyage arena show in London, where digital avatars of the four members perform with a live band. The avatars fit a group that had always treated the show as something built, from the Eurovision costumes in Brighton in 1974 to the layered studio records of the 1970s at Polar Music.

Start with Gold for the hits in one sequence. Arrival is the album that best shows the peak of the writing and the production. The Album and Voulez-Vous show the range across 1977 and 1979. Super Trouper (1980) is the later period, when the splits are easiest to hear, alongside The Winner Takes It All. The Bay City Rollers and Sweet were in a similar teen-pop lane in the 1970s, with less of the songwriting ambition. The closer comparison for the craft is the Carpenters: vocal arrangements and melodic care, without the European studio sheen. The ABBA records add the detail of the two breakups, Agnetha and Bjorn in 1979, Benny and Anni-Frid in 1981, which got clearer once those dates were public.