ABBA "The Visitors"

The Visitors is the eighth and final studio album by Swedish pop group ABBA, released on 30 November 1981.

With The Visitors, ABBA took several steps away from the "lighter" pop music they had recorded previously and the album is often regarded as a more complex and mature effort. The opening track, "The Visitors", with its ominous synthesizer sounds and the distinctive lead vocal by Frida, announced a change in musical style. With Benny and Frida going their separate ways, the pain of splitting up was explored yet again in "When All Is Said and Done". The major hit single on the album, "One of Us", also depicted the end of a love story. Elsewhere there were current Cold War themes—highly topical at the time—and further songs of isolation and regret.

The Visitors was one of the first records ever to be recorded and mixed digitally, and was the first in history to be pressed on the new CD format in 1982 (though in terms of commercial release dates, it was predated by the Japanese release of Billy Joel's 52nd Street). The Visitors has been reissued in digitally remastered form three times—first in 1997, then in 2001 and again in 2005 as part of The Complete Studio Recordings box set.

The Visitors Deluxe Edition was released on 23 April 2012. As with previous releases in the Deluxe Edition series, this version of ABBA’s final album offers a DVD of archive material along with CD bonus tracks – including the demo medley "From a Twinkling Star to a Passing Angel", the first previously-unreleased ABBA recordings since 1994.

By 1980, tensions in ABBA had heightened. Both couples — Benny Andersson & Anni-Frid Lyngstad, and Björn Ulvaeus & Agnetha Fältskog — had divorced during that year, adding strain to the musical partnership. Recording began on what was to become ABBA's final studio album on 16 March 1981. Ulvaeus mentioned in retrospect that the sessions were troubled, noting, "It could be frosty sometimes." Lyngstad also commented that they were beginning to tire of working together.

The members of ABBA and their personnel have memories of the recording sessions for this album being rather difficult. To begin with, their sound engineer Michael Tretow had to become accustomed to using the new 32-track digital recorder that had been purchased for Polar Music Studios. He said, "Digital recording...cut out all the hiss, but it also meant that sounds were sharply cut off below a certain level. The sound simply became too clean, so I had to find ways of compensating for that." The first three tracks for the album had already been recorded using analogue tape and therefore Tretow had to transfer all subsequent tracks from digital to analogue and back again to avoid a difference in quality.

On its release, The Visitors reached the top of the charts in a number of territories but was not as successful as their previous albums.

Rune Söderqvist designed the cover and photographed the group in a room containing Julius Kronberg's painting of Eros. The room is the Atelje Studio in Skansen Park, Stockholm. The group are positioned apart and appear to be waiting solemnly in the shadows

Track listing

All tracks written by Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus.

Side one

1. "The Visitors" 5:49
2. "Head over Heels" 3:45
3. "When All Is Said and Done" 3:20
4. "Soldiers" 4:38

Side two

1. "I Let the Music Speak" 5:20
2. "One of Us" 3:55
3. "Two for the Price of One" 3:36
4. "Slipping Through My Fingers" 3:51
5. "Like an Angel Passing Through My Room" 3:25

Total length: 37:39

1997 CD edition bonus tracks

1. "Should I Laugh or Cry"
2. "The Day Before You Came"
3. "Under Attack"
4. "You Owe Me One" (B-side of Under Attack)