Thank you for the (new) music, ABBA, it’s awesome

My, my ... a lot has changed in 40 years, but ABBA isn’t one of them. The Swedes’ first album since 1981 — Voyage — is a sentimental retro journey and joyous ode to ageing.

‘ABBAtars’ complete the comeback. Picture: Supplied

When ABBA last released a new album Margaret Thatcher was in her first term, Raiders of the Lost Ark was ruling the box office and Britney Spears hadn’t been born. A lot has changed in the 40 years since The Visitors, but happily ABBA aren’t one of them. Their new record gives us — bar some septuagenarian tweaks, including at least three songs about animals — the Swedes we know and love. Or rather pretended to hate for ages and admitted to loving around 2002.

Voyage is a reassuringly familiar blend of clear-eyed sentiment, outrageous musicality and utter indifference to fashion. Like much of Abba’s back catalogue, these songs can sound naff on first listen, yet you’re pulled in by Benny Andersson’s melodic oomph and Bjorn Ulvaeus’s eccentric lyrical insights. Agnetha Faltskog and Anni-Frid Lyngstad share the lead vocals, and their voices, though a touch lower, remain pristine and moving. Do I detect more of a Swedish tone in Lyngstad’s singing? If so, that’s no bad thing.

Swedish pop group ABBA, wearing kimonos in 1976. From left, Bjorn Ulvaeus, Agnetha Faltskog, Frida Lyngstad and Benny Andersson. Picture: RB/Redferns/Getty Images

The group set out their stall brilliantly in September with the lead single, I Still Have Faith in You, which manages simultaneously to be about ageing, lost love and the prospect of making a massively hyped comeback including an album and a string of holographic — sorry, avatar — shows. “Do I have it in me?” Lyngstad sings, the thrilling key change underlining the suspicion that she is referring to four decades of expectations.

Gratifyingly retro

Apart from a brief detour into dance music, the album is gratifyingly retro. When You Danced with Me deploys electronic bagpipes to worryingly stirring effect, and No Doubt About It does the same with Eighties synths and what sounds like a banjo. Its opening line ("I can remember when you left Kilkenny") echoes the one about Glasgow in Super Trouper. Do they have a thing for the Celts?

Don’t Shut Me Down, meanwhile, revisits the group’s old friend, the cod-reggae lilt, alongside some shameless, Liberace-worthy piano glissandos. It sounds awful on paper yet wins you over by the mightiness of the chorus.

The recent single Just a Notion is more questionable, mainly owing to a knockabout piano that’s dangerously reminiscent of Shakin’ Stevens. It has vim, though, the promise that “we’ll be dancing through the night” impressive for a band in their seventies and reminding you of Ulvaeus’s recent claim to have sex four times a week.

ABBA’s album release comes with a concert performance that sees the quartet going entirely digital. The group created a holographic live show, using motion capture and other techniques, with George Lucas' special-effects company, Industrial Light & Magic. Picture: Baillie Walsh

Could there be a hint of autumn-years nooky in the schmaltzy but strange Little Things, which pictures a couple in bed on Christmas morning? Noting her partner’s “naughty eyes”, the woman muses: “You’d consider bringing me a breakfast tray, but there’s a price.” What’s the price? Peeling the parsnips, or having a festive quickie before the grandchildren come in?

Animal influence

The last few songs are dominated — for the first time I can recall on an ABBA album — by animals. Keep an Eye on Dan tackles a split through the pet left behind ("He gets out of hand if you let him"), while Bumble Bee is an ecological ode whose hero is “a tiny, fuzzy ball and I wonder how he can fly at all”. Most poignant is I Can Be That Woman, in which a couple’s relationship upheavals are witnessed by a mutt called Tammy. “The dog, bless her heart, licks my fingers,” Faltskog sings. “But she jerks every time you swear.”

Well, it makes a change from divorce. As does the pseudo-political closer, Ode to Freedom, which concludes that “there is no ode to freedom truly worth remembering”. It’s not quite Martin Luther King, but so what? The music has the choral, string-soaked wallop of I Dreamed a Dream. Faltskog, Ulvaeus, Andersson and Lyngstad are demonstrating the best thing about ageing - not giving a hoot what other people think. So, do they have it in them? On the strength of these ten songs, it’s a resounding yes.

ABBA: Voyage (Label: Polar/Universal; critic’s rating: 4/5

The new ABBA album, Voyage, on display at a record store in Stockholm. Picture: Jonathan Nackstrand/AFP

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