Voyage: 'Vintage Abba' or 'bafflingly retrograde' - comeback album splits opinion

Forty years after their last studio album, Abba have made one of the most anticipated comebacks in music with the release of their new record, Voyage.

The 10-track album has divided opinion among critics, however.

"It's vintage Abba, on par with their classic 1970s run," declared Rolling Stone in a four-star review.

But The Guardian's two-star write-up warned that Voyage is a "disappointment" that languishes in "often bafflingly retrograde settings".

The album comes two months after the Swedish pop legends released the first two new songs, I Still Have Faith In You and Don't Shut Me Down.

The Guardian's Jude Rogers said "the glamour promised by this album's two terrific singles goes horribly unfulfilled".

"Rather than reflecting poignantly on the past, much of the rest of Voyage feels terminally stuck there."

The band first reconvened in the recording studio in 2018

Of the album tracks, When You Danced With Me provokes "mild nausea" while a Christmas song called Little Things, which is third on the track list, is a "big crime against sense, sentimentality and sequencing", she said.

"If only they had stopped at those two knowing songs, leaving the rest to our dazzling imaginations."

Even Rolling Stone filed Little Things under "stomach-churning filler".

"But otherwise," the magazine's critic Rob Sheffield wrote, "Voyage reflects how far these four have travelled, musically and emotionally.

"There's no embarrassing attempt to get up to date with the bops the kids are into these days, a compliment to their integrity."

Voyage "piles on the tragic drama", he wrote. "It's a whole album of The Winner Takes It All, without any Mamma Mia or Take a Chance On Me."

He concluded: "It's a surprise to have these Swedes back in the game. But it's a bigger, sweeter surprise that they returned so full of musical vitality."

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The Independent's Helen Brown gave Voyage five stars and agreed that it was "a triumphant album awash with Abba's gung-ho uncoolness" that "delivers all the classic Abba flavours".

"Abba haven't tried to update the gloriously gaudy vintage tinsel of their 80s office party sound," she said. "[Bjorn] Ulvaeus and [Benny] Andersson have always been canny businessmen and they know their appeal has never been about being 'on trend'."

The Times' critic Ed Potton described Voyage as "a reassuringly familiar blend of clear-eyed sentiment, outrageous musicality and utter indifference to fashion".

He wrote: "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."

'A strange, confused record'

Despite the piano on Just A Notion being "dangerously reminiscent of Shakin' Stevens", Potton alluded to the lyrics of I Still Have Faith In You when he concluded: "Do they have it in them? On the strength of these 10 songs, it's a resounding yes."

The i newspaper's Kate Solomon referred to the same lyric, but came up with a different answer.

"Do they have it in them? Sadly, the answer on Voyage is no," she wrote.

It is a "strange, confused record", she explained.

"It feels like we've been promised paradigm-shifting new material and ended up with a load of B-sides and rarities...

"There's a sort of Sound of Music feel to the whole endeavour; a slightly daggy, overly sentimental attempt at recapturing something that had already been lost."

The band members wore motion capture suits to create avatars for their forthcoming virtual concerts

The Telegraph's Neil McCormick said Faltskog and Lyngstad "can still hold a tune", while Andersson and Ulvaeus "have not lost their ability to craft a flowing melody adorned with glittering hooks".

"Voyage is a gentle OAP cruise around the backwaters of Abba's reputation," he wrote.

The New Statesman's Kate Mossman said she was "repeatedly struck by the bizarre tone of late-period Abba's domestic psychodramas".

"Abba do a great line in mature romance, though - a kind of knowing, twinkly-eyed boomer romance you don't see anywhere else apart from on ads for life insurance."

Andersson told BBC News that "we don't need to prove anything here", adding: "I don't think we're taking a risk because if people think that we were better 40 years ago, fine."

He said he thinks Voyage will be the quartet's swansong. "I've said that's it," he told BBC entertainment correspondent Colin Paterson. "I don't want to do another Abba album.

"But I'm not alone in this. There are four of us. If they twist my arm, I might change my mind."

Ulvaeus added: "I never say never, but I agree with Benny. I think that was our goodbye."

The band will, however, continue in the form of animated digital avatars dubbed Abbatars, which will "perform" at virtual concerts in a specially-constructed arena in London from next May.

On Thursday, they released a trailer giving an idea of how the shows will look.