In summer 1976 I was a shaggy, bell-bottomed, 13-year-old dork. Mom and I had moved in with Stepfather Number Two the previous year and I was spending a lot of time next door hanging out with our neighbors Kirk (14) and Jenny (his 12-year-old sister). Jenny adored the Bay City Rollers with every fiber of her budding-adolescent being, while Kirk and I—well, let’s be real—we were not one iota cooler than that, in the midst of a summer-long crush of our own on ABBA.
Two years prior, the Swedish quartet made up of two couples—Agnetha Fältskog and Björn Ulvaeus, and Anni-Frid Lyngstad and Benny Andersson—had won the 1974 Eurovision Song Contest (not that Kirk and I even knew said contest existed at the time). By then Björn and Benny had been collaborating for several years as songwriters and producers and had recognized the potential—both professional and personal—when they met solo artists Agnetha and Anni-Frid in 1969. The quartet worked on songs, named their new group by jumbling together the four principals’ first initials, and recorded a debut album that sold well in Sweden (1973’s Ring Ring).
The following year, the group’s second album and US debut Waterloo shot up the charts first in Europe and then in the US, with the title single peaking at #6. Their self-titled 1975 follow-up spun off multiple hit singles worldwide, notably “Mamma Mia” and “S.O.S.,” cementing the quartet’s status as international hitmakers and drawing the attention of a couple of barely-teenaged pop fans in Northern California. When Arrival came along in fall 1976, we were already among the millions who had been watching the album’s mega-singles “Dancing Queen,” “Knowing Me, Knowing You,” and “Fernando” climb the charts.
The tale from there gets murkier. After my 13-year-old summer and fall of innocent pop-rock bliss, I gravitated steadily towards heavier fare, and a year or so later Kirk and Jenny moved away. By the time The Album arrived in 1977, I had moved on, too. ABBA would issue three more well-received albums before calling it a day in 1982, but while they were busy during those years branching into disco and synth-pop, I was air-guitaring my way down a highway to you-know-where.
A decade after ABBA broke up, Polydor’s 1992 release of Gold: Greatest Hits sparked a kind of renaissance for the group that has continued up to today, including a stage musical (Mamma Mia), two movies (Mamma Mia and its sequel), a reunion album (2021’s Voyage) and a hologram tour. It seems it really is true: a great pop melody is forever. As for this particular hits collection, there is good news and bad news.
The good news is that Gold does several things very well. It includes all of the group’s charting hits with the exception of “Ring Ring,” which only charted in Sweden. It’s generous, clocking in at 19 tracks and over 70 minutes of music on a single CD, and there are no bonus tracks, live cuts, remixes, or other padding, just all those familiar hits. As a bonus, the booklet in the 1999 reissue I picked up includes an abundance of color photos from back in the day and an in-depth essay/band history by band chronicler Carl Magnus Palm.
The not-so-good news is that it seems I didn’t miss a whole lot by exiting the scene when I did. In its early years ABBA was a group full of personality; whether they attempted driving pop-rock (“Waterloo”), vocally ambitious pop (“Mamma Mia,” “S.O.S.”), melodic proto-disco (“Dancing Queen”) or lush ballads (“Fernando”), they hit their marks with both precision and flair, delivering honest emotion and cotton-candy choruses in equal measure.
Beginning with 1977’s The Album, though, their sound grew glossier and more dance-oriented and ABBA began to feel less like a band than a brand. The nine tracks here from 1979 and beyond are nearly indistinguishable from one another to these ears, whether they lean disco-lite or early synth-pop on any given track. The latest cut collected here that feels worth a second listen is 1978’s lightweight but catchy “Take A Chance On Me.”
Finally, Gold commits a mortal sin in my book: it jumbles the songs chronologically, so that you (a) get no clear sense of how the group’s sound was evolving from year to year, and (b) are forced to wade through a lot of inferior latter-day songs in between the higher-quality early material.
Not that Andersson, Ulvaeus, Fälkstog and Lyngstad have any reason to care about my assessment of their creative trajectory; they’ve had a phenomenally successful run that continues to this day, and deservedly so: in their prime they were genuine pop-rock savants who conquered the known world. And let’s face it: the songs you fall for when you’re 13 are almost always going to sound better than whatever comes after.