ABBA is back! 'Dancing Queen' band announces last virtual concert: 'This is it'

ABBA is releasing its first new music in four decades, along with a concert performance that will see the “Dancing Queen” quartet going entirely digital.

The forthcoming album “Voyage,” to be released Nov. 5, is a follow-up to 1981′s “The Visitors,” which until now had been the swan song of the Swedish supergroup. And a virtual version of the band will begin a series of concerts in London on May 27.

“We took a break in the spring of 1982 and now we’ve decided it’s time to end it,” ABBA said in a statement Thursday. “They say it’s foolhardy to wait more than 40 years between albums, so we’ve recorded a follow-up to ‘The Visitors.’”

The group has been creating the holographic live show, using motion capture and other techniques, with George Lucas’ special-effects company, Industrial Light & Magic.

They call it “the strangest and most spectacular concert you could ever dream of.”

“We’re going to be able to sit back in an audience and watch our digital selves perform our songs,” the group’s statement said. “Weird and wonderful!”

The planned show spurred the making of the album, which features the new songs “I Still Have Faith In You” and “Don’t Shut Me Down.” It began with sessions in 2018 and was delayed by the coronavirus pandemic.

In an interview with Apple Music's Zane Lowe, published Thursday, Ulvaeus spoke about the group's reunion, insisting the group never broke up permanently but took a break for "creative reasons."

"We ended because we felt the energy was running out in the studio, because we didn't have as much fun in the studio as we did this time," he said, according to a press release. "We never said, 'This is it. We've split, and we'll never reunite again.' We never said that. We just said back then that we'd go on a break. And this break has now ended."

But, this concert and album will for sure the the last you hear of the band, Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson confirmed in an interview with the Guardian.

"This is it ... It’s got to be, you know,” Andersson said in the interview published Wednesday. 

While the band took a 40-year pause Andersson added: "I didn’t actually say that ‘this is it’ in 1982 … I never said myself that Abba was never going to happen again. But I can tell you now: this is it.”

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Even though ABBA took 40 years off from making new music, Ulvaeus added that the bonds formed among his fellow bandmates are as strong as ever.

"Everything came rushing back like it was yesterday," he said. "I looked around and I looked into Agnetha (Fältskog)'s eyes and Frida (Lyngstad)'s eyes, and there was this same kind of feeling — the warmth and the friendship and the bonds between us."

The show will come 50 years after the founding of the group that consisted of two married couples for most of its existence, and whose name is an acronym of the first names of its members, Fältskog, 71, Ulvaeus, 76, Andersson, 74, and Anni-Frid Lyngstad, 75.

Their music has remained ubiquitous in the decades since their breakup, in part because of the stage musical “Mamma Mia!” and the two films that followed it.

They were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2010.

Last week the group launched a website with the title “ ABBA Voyage,” teasing the new announcement. Tickets go on sale Tuesday.

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Contributing: Charles Trepany