Voyage is the ninth and final studio album by the Swedish pop group ABBA, released on 5 November 2021.
With ten songs written by Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus, it is the group's first album of new material in forty years, following The Visitors (1981).
[11] Voyage debuted atop the charts of Australia, Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK.
It also became the group's highest-charting studio album ever in Canada and the United States, debuting at number two on the charts in both countries.
[13] ABBA informally split up in 1983, following the release of their retrospective greatest hits album The Singles: The First Ten Years in late 1982.
Renewed interest in the band grew from the 1990s onwards following the worldwide success of their greatest hits album ABBA Gold, the ABBA-based musical Mamma Mia!
In October, British manager Simon Fuller announced in a statement that the group would be reuniting to work on a new "digital entertainment experience".
[22] The project would feature the members in their "life-like" avatar form, called ABBAtars, based on their late 1970s tour and would be set to launch by the spring of 2019.
[25] One of the album's tracks, "Just a Notion", was previously partially included in a demo version as part of the medley "ABBA Undeleted" from the 1994 Thank You for the Music box set.
The two songs first announced in 2018, "I Still Have Faith in You" and "Don't Shut Me Down", were confirmed as the double-sided lead single from Voyage during the September 2021 live stream.
To animate them, the ABBA band members wore motion-capture suits and were filmed using 160 cameras, with graphics later added by visual effects company Industrial Light & Magic.
The COVID-19 pandemic then forced the band to push the tour back to 2022, turning it then into a seven-month residency in London,[35][36] with the possibility to extend the shows up until April 2026.
[38] Stephen Thomas Erlewine from AllMusic website gave the album three and a half stars out of five and noted that "Andersson and Ulvaeus wisely decided not to follow any stylistic trend or adopt any modern production technique" which made the songs "recognizably ABBA music".
[40] Helen Brown from The Independent gave it a full rating of five out of five stars and noted that, as with songs from the 1970s albums, ABBA didn't try to follow the trend or "to update the gloriously gaudy vintage tinsel of their Eighties office party sound" and she stated that a lot of that comes from the fact that the song's creators, Bjorn and Benny, realized from the beginning, "it was their lack of freshness that struck a chord with everyone's inner outsider" and enabled them to have a long career.
[49] Ed Potton from The Times magazine rated it with four stars out of five and stated that "Voyage is a reassuringly familiar blend of clear-eyed sentiment, outrageous musicality and utter indifference to fashion".
[50] He praised Frida (about whom he claimed to have noticed a stronger Swedish accent than usual, although he doesn't consider this a bad thing) and Agnetha's vocals, calling them "pristine and moving", and wrote that even though the "songs can sound naff on first listen yet you’re pulled in by Benny Andersson’s melodic oomph and Bjorn Ulvaeus’ eccentric lyrical insights".