When ABBA cracked up

Looking back at The Visitors, ABBA's best and least-perfect album.

ABBA makes the type of music only nazi breeding programs could create. It isn’t just that their greatest music is perfect, it's that it's perfect in a way that feels spontaneous and unexpected after hundreds of plays. It’s perfect in a way that makes you feel like these songs always existed, that there’s sheet music for “SOS” hidden in one of Putin’s vaults. The best pop music exists on the knife’s edge of replay-value complexity and Adamic simplicity; while ABBA certainly have their share of regrettable album filler, their best music makes you wonder why Max Martin hasn’t joined a monastery already.

By the time of their last album, The Visitors, they had fallen off that knife’s edge. Despite it being their best album, almost none of The Visitors is perfect; only in a handful of choruses and the laser-precise session musicianship does that ABBA factory-made perfection re-emerge. And even then, it’s often a type of perfection that you rarely expect; the chorus of the underrated “Two For the Price of One” is perfect, yes, but it's a much different flavor of perfection than “Dancing Queen,” steadily building brick by brick with contrapuntal vocal lines and a wobbly bass groove that gets more off-balance until it resolves for the final “price of one.” And then, everything clicks together and you remember this is an ABBA album after all.

The seeds of The Visitors’ glorious imperfection first appeared on Super Trouper. Trouper is a classic ABBA album, both sonically and how it sports a 70-30 ratio of pop genius to charming kitsch. But the Side A closer “The Winner Takes it All” is something of a sign of things to come, perhaps the starkest pivot away from the disco jubilance of Voulez-Vous. The tune is a classic ABBA midtempo anthem with dramatic descending piano chords and AA’s booming voices, but it has an edginess, a darkness that sets it apart from the buoyance of “Chiquitita” or “SOS.” It sounds angry, insane as that proposition seems from a band whose album covers usually look like non-pornographic American Apparel ads. That tune was at least partially inspired by Bjorn and Agnetha’s divorce, a split that haunts all of The Visitors’ music. Benny and Anni-Frid had also called it quits by the time of the Visitors sessions, and so you were left with four extremely talented colleagues rather than the quasi-polycule that made “Mamma Mia.” The sessions weren’t as acrimonious as, say, Siamese Dream, but by all members’ accounts they still had the air of glum inevitability and pleasant awkwardness one would expect from a pair of recent divorcees. Their music was better for it.

Take the title track. “The Visitors” is not about the divorces or the band’s imminent separation—most sources say it's about the persecution of Eastern Bloc dissidents (I’d have guessed aliens)—but I certainly wouldn’t have figured that out without a visit to Wikipedia. The lyrics that jump out on preliminary listens: “Voices growing louder, irritation building/And I'm close to fainting/Crackin' up” don’t sound like a breakup, but they capture the panic and terror of realizing the relationship you built your life around is failing all the same. The chorus is catchy and fun all the same, but the verses—led in by alien synthesizers, Anni-Frid’s voice washed into the mix as she sings an unusually thin melody—offer few of the immediate pleasures of ABBA’s other works. It almost doesn’t work, until the chorus kicks in and the push and pull between BB’s pop craft and newfound experimentation makes sense.

On the pop side, “Head Over Heels” is the closest thing the record has to a classic ABBA track. Again, it’s on the darker side of their catalogue, telling the story of a high-society lady who, shockingly, isn’t terribly fond of her life of glamour. The music is a very Swedish take on tango music, which is to say it sounds like you locked Classical composer in a cage and threw pennies at him until he wrote a waltz in 4/4. Again: it’s fantastic. The music is off-kilter, wobbly; the verses consist of Agnetha gliding between phrases in a lounge-singer cadence, while the chorus practically shouts (showing off that digital multi-tracking capability) as session wizard Ola Brunkert pounds a cut-time drum rhythm. “Soldiers,” the side A closer, is pretty close to ABBA Original Recipe, sort of a melancholy flip on “Dancing Queen,” but any chance it might have lit up future ‘70s nights was dashed when BB decided to make the song about “militarism” and nuclear war. Or more, crucially, decided to drop direct melodies of their best work for a dense proto-Cocteau Twins chorus. Naturally, all of these were left off the blockbuster comp ABBA Gold, as was every track save “One Of Us.”

“One of Us” is one of the two songs explicitly about the breakup, alongside “When All is Said and Done;” they are probably the happiest-sounding songs on the record. Lyrically, “One of Us” is the more honest song—despite being about a fictional woman, it’s still as bitter, desperate, and remorseful as you’d hope from a breakup song written by two divorced men and sung by their ex-wives. The decision to give the track a bouncy cod-reggae rhythm a là “Haitian Divorce” only heightens the fundamental sadness of the tune, like a breakup on a tropical Summer vacation.

“When All is Said and Done,” by contrast, is a breakup song for the breakup everyone wishes they had. It’s triumphant, celebratory, happy to move on to a new chapter—it would come across as charmingly pathetic if it wasn’t written by Björn about Benny and Agnetha’s split, like your best friend with his arm around your shoulder telling you about all the other fish in the sea. At one point in the tune, Agnetha proclaims that she (and Benny? And Björn? The authorial handoffs make things unclear) is “not too old for sex,” a line that I’m not sure anyone involved realized how nakedly desperate it is. It’s honest, in other words; specifically, it’s honest about the ways that we’re usually never honest with ourselves in breakups. You guys were in your prime here, sure. Have fun with Chess.

If there’s a point of comparison for ABBA stateside, it’s the Carpenters, another ‘70s group that would have dissolved into ash after MTV launched if they didn’t have tunes that echoed through the halls of eternity. Both bands were deeply lame, even in their time, and it was only after Western countries collectively stopped smoking cigarettes for breakfast that we realized that music doesn’t have to be cool to be great. “Slipping Through My Fingers” is a very Carpenters-esque tune; while the lyrics are about Agnetha and Benny’s kid going to school for the first time, the tempo and sound recall Karen and Richard’s masterpiece “Goodbye to Love.” “Slipping Through” isn’t as good as that song, but both show how crucial craftsmanship is to making a great ballad. You want to dismiss the song as maudlin or not playing to ABBA’s uptempo strengths, but then you hear that maddeningly catchy chorus or that outro guitar solo and then you surrender and start looking into joining the Sweden Democrats. What both the Carpenters and ABBA remind us is that while posture and style counts for a lot in music—moreso than basically any artistic medium—no amount of B&W polaroids of you smoking a cigarette will make a great song, just as no truly great songs can ever be bulldozed by the arbiters of Cool Taste.

Still, it’s “Two For the Price of One”—often singled out as one of ABBA’s worst songs—that I keep returning to. On the surface, “Price” is a novelty song, a jokey character piece a la “Escape (The Piña Colada Song)” about a lovesick man who responds to a personal ad in search of a threesome. The punchline, of course, is that the second woman in the threesome is the first’s mother. If you heard a sad trombone sound effect reading that, so did Bjorn and Benny, who put in a hilarious marching band outro after the joke hits. The song is sung by Bjorn; before this, his most recent lead cut had been the Meat Loaf-esque quasi-rockabilly tune “Does Your Mother Know,” a classic 70s pedophile song. Bjorn’s thin voice worked for the sleaze of that track; but here it achieves a much more ambiguous effect, making the jokey lyrics of “Two” sound much more pathetic and desperate. As does the arrangement, which stops and starts like a showtune with only little drum/guitar hits to punctuate the piano-driven arrangement of the verses. Once again, it’s the aforementioned chorus that clarifies everything, with AA’s beautiful contrapuntal vocal harmonies adding to the dissonant serenity. The song is strange, imperfect, kitschy, and one of the best things ABBA has ever done, both a profoundly sad joke and as catchy as anything they’ve ever made.

Not everything works perfectly. “Like an Angel Passing Through My Room” works as a closer but is still not up to ABBA’s standards of replayability. And “I Let the Music Speak” is one of those tracks where whether or not it's the worst song on the album or a bold, operatic interlude depends on the day. It’s clear that musical theater was where BB’s attention was by the time they were writing this; “Music” probably belongs onstage, but in the context of an ABBA record it feels disorienting, like Andrew Lloyd Webber breaking into The Sweet’s recording studio. The effect is appreciated, even if five and a half minutes were surely not needed.

ABBA didn’t release another album after The Visitors until their 2021 comeback Voyage, tied to their bizarre virtual concert residency. I haven’t yet listened to Voyage, but it seems like the type of late-career comeback album that earns a few courtesy 7s from music publications before being quickly forgotten about. The Visitors, by contrast, is the perfect closing act for ABBA. It is not a culminating work, nor is it a grand sendoff by a group of pop icons. It’s four people trying to reckon with radically changed circumstances, trying to chart a course forward musically. It’s a sad farewell to two marriages and one great band. ABBA’s other records arguably have higher highs, and The Visitors being such a “critic’s favorite” makes me hesitant in overpraising it (it doesn’t, actually, but it’s nice to pretend). It's not their defining work, but it is their best, the album that showed what these four were capable of.