Mamma mia, here they go again.
ABBA, the beloved Swedish pop group, announced Thursday in a global livestreamed event that, after nearly 40 years, it will release a new 10-track album, “Voyage,” on Nov. 10 via Universal Music Group’s Capitol label.
The group debuted two of its new songs, “I Still Have Faith in You” and “Don’t Shut Me Down,” for fans during the event, which at one point had more than 200,000 people tuning in live.
There will also be a new concert featuring the group — made up of Agnetha Fältskog, Anni-Frid Lyngstad, Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus — performing digitally as avatars, aka “ABBA-tars” with a live 10-piece band.
The concert, which will kick off May 27, 2022, will take place at an a new arena, called — you guessed it — ABBA Arena, at Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in London.
The “ABBA-tars” were “created following weeks and months of motion-capture and performance techniques with the four band members and an 850-strong team from Industrial Light & Magic, the company founded by George Lucas, in what is the company’s first foray into music,” the band said in its news release.
ABBA is considered one of the most successful music group of all time, selling nearly 400 million albums worldwide.
In recent years, the group has seen a resurgence in popularity, thanks to the musical “Mamma Mia!” and subsequent films starring Meryl Streep, Amanda Seyfried, Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth, Stellan Skarsgård and others.
More recently, ABBA’s music has trended on TikTok, as younger fans rediscover the group’s most popular hits, including “Dancing Queen,” “Chiquitita” and “Slipping Through My Fingers.”
“Content using the #ABBA hashtag on TikTok recently reached one billion views, without the catalogue officially being available on the platform,” the band said in its news release.
The band officially made its own TikTok account this week. As of Thursday, it had amassed more than 738,000 followers and 3.2 million likes.
“It’s been a while since we made music together,” the band said in its announcement. “Almost 40 years, actually. We took a break in the spring of 1982 and now we’ve decided it’s time to end it.”
The inspiration to record again came from the band’s “involvement in creating the strangest and most spectacular concert you could ever dream of,” it said. On its ABBA Voyage website, the concert is described as one “that combines the old and new, the young and not-so-young.”
“The Voyage project has injected new life into us in more ways than one,” Ulvaeus said in the statement. “So, again, thanks for waiting! We hope to see you in the ‘ABBA Arena’ and yes — see — because we have infused a good deal of our souls into those avatars. It’s not an exaggeration to say that we’re back.”
Diana Dasrath contributed.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
