Meanwhile, Anni-Frid (Frida) Lyngstad recorded her first solo album in seven years, working with Phil Collins to produce Something's Going On, and Agnetha Fältskog took a break from music to spend time with her children.

[13] The production was influenced by the "sequencer-driven, shrill blipping sound" popular on the records of contemporary musicians such as Gary Numan, The Human League, Soft Cell and Depeche Mode.

An example is the "carefree", "spontaneous", and "conversational" synthetic twin flutes, which begin their "integral role in the soundscape [by] offering regular bouts of whimsical reassurance" at the very start of the track.

[14] Swedish novelist Jerker Virdborg noted in a newspaper piece 20 years later that the vocal is "sung by a dimmed and turned off...Agnetha Fältskog".

[17] Many years after the song was recorded, Michael Tretow recalled Agnetha performing the lead with dimmed lights and said that the mood had become sad and everybody in the studio knew that 'this was the end'.

On this rumour, Stephen Emms of The Guardian continues the story by saying "finishing her vocals, our heroine was to remove her headphones and walk solemnly out into the daylight, never to return".

[18] The song was promoted by a music video clip filmed on 21 September 1982, and produced by the team of director Kjell Sundvall and cinematographer Kjell-Åke Andersson, breaking ABBA's eight-year directing relationship with Lasse Hallström.

The change in direction had been prompted by Polar Music and its affiliates, who believed Hallström's "sometimes unglamorous, almost documentary-style aesthetics" were out of step with the "spectacular, American-type, glossy video" becoming increasingly popular via MTV, and had decided a fresh focus was necessary.

[15][19] Sundvall and Andersson, regarded as an up-and-coming filmmaker team, were recruited by Björn to replace Hallström on the advice of his wife Lena Källersjö, who had worked with them on another project.

[19] The video featured scenes filmed on location in and around Stockholm, showing Agnetha flirting with and developing a romantic relationship with a stranger on a train, played by Swedish actor Jonas Bergström, best known for his role in Jerry Lewis's unfinished and unreleased 1972 movie The Day the Clown Cried.

[23] Overall, the video shoot went well - Kjell-Åke Andersson reported Agnetha was "incredibly easy to work with"[22] - but Sundvall would later recall a strange atmosphere: “It didn’t really feel like we had been working with a group, but with four individuals.”[19] Christopher Patrick, in ABBA: Let the Music Speak, says the final sequence in the music video, in which "the train [where the narrator meets her lover] shunts off into oblivion, leaving in its wake a bleak and deserted railway station", is a fitting metaphor for ABBA, having reached the end of their creative partnership.

Acoustic instruments had been slowly replaced by a more synth-sound ever since Super Trouper, and by this time, ABBA's final output would have "s[a]t very comfortably on either of the two albums Benny and Björn … produced for Swedish duo Gemini in the mid-'80s", as they are also "quite minimalist in arrangements and orchestration", and synth-orientated.

[33][38][39] Stephen Emms for The Guardian argues that the "ordinariness [and] universality [of the] first-person account" of a depressing day is what draws the audience in, and "morphs [the song] into an unusually poignant parable of what modern life means".

He points out that beyond the supposed simplicity, the lyrics are "oddly imprecise...in a vague recollective tone", and adds that the fact sentences include phrases such as "I must have...", "I'm pretty sure...", or "...or something in that style" implies that Agnetha is an "unreliable narrator" and give the entire song a veil of ambiguity.

He says that as non-native speakers, they rarely used metaphors or poetic imagery, and instead relied on a "matter-of-fact reportage of feeling", resulting in a "slight stiltedness" which, he argues "is what makes ABBA great lyricists".

He says that this style of lyric writing, coupled with the female leads' "occasional...halting pronunciation... could make them sound devastatingly direct and vulnerable", as shown in The Day Before You Came.

[41] Priya Elan of NME says "a deeper probe [into the lyrics] suggests something a bit darker at the core" than just a woman reflecting on her life before meeting her lover.

He also comments on the "disorientating ambiguity" of the lyrics, reminiscent of a "zombie sleepwalking through their life", and also notes the line "I need a lot of sleep", which suggests the narrator is suffering from depression.

[39] Margaret-Mary Lieb, as part of the 13th Annual KOTESOL International Conference, suggested that a variety of "grammar lessons...can be based on popular songs", and states that "The Day Before You Came" "offers reinforcement of past modals".

[43][39] The "latest [novel] by Marilyn French", by the time the song was written, was the 1980 work The Bleeding Heart, which involves a couple who meet on the train, and "fall instantly in love, only to discover they agree on nothing...from the start [knowing] they have only one year together".

Emms opined that the song is a "forgotten masterpiece", and that the mixture of "the genuine sense of loss in Agnetha's voice, Frida's operatics, a moodily expressionist video and plaintive synths as omnipresent as the rain 'rattling' on the roof .

Emms also interpreted that the pathos is "heightened by an extended funereal instrumental coda which acts as one big question mark, leaving us with the feeling that this is not just a meditation on the quotidian but something greater, existential even.

[48] Kultur says the song "is portrayed, sophisticated enough, simply by harmonies and minor cadences, topped off with Anni-Frid Lyngstad's obbligato that could just as easily belong in a baroque largo by Handel and Albinoni".

[51] In a critique of the 2012 album The Visitors [Deluxe Edition], in which "The Day Before You Came" is a bonus track, Tom Ewing of Pitchfork describes the song as the "career highlight" for ABBA.

He suggests that the song holds the view that "life is unstable, happiness may be fleeting, and your world can be instantly and forever overturned", and comments that these "strong, resonant ideas" are the perfect way for the band to have ended their career, and serves as an almost "spectral, uneasy premonition .

He says that into the "dying fade", there is a "faint haze of farewell"[14] In her paper The Return of Melodrama, Maaike Meijer explains that critic Guus Middag analysed "The Day Before You Came" within the context of examining how "unsophisticated texts [such as popular songs] were able to evoke [immediate emotion] in the reader".

She also comments on novelist Marcel Möring's reading of "The Day Before You Came" "as a serious poem", thereby "demonstrat[ing] how a song could be transformed into a complex, multi-layered and interesting text, thanks to an interpretative approach, which looks for these aspects".

Möring saw the song as "small labyrinths of language, refined aquarelle paintings, complex clockworks of Swiss precision", which Meijer says is an analysis fitting of a "poem deserving careful reading".

In a career largely based in trying to stuff as much into one song as possible – a "more is better" philosophy – Elan noted that it is unusual for the "track [to] scuttle...along like a slow heartbreak, sparsely painting its picture with the sole palette of a synth and Agnetha’s lone vocal".

He concludes the analysis with: "the song is the ultimate tease, a door left ajar, a murder mystery with its final page torn out...which arguably makes it all the more wonderful".