The Visitors (ABBA album)

The Visitors
Studio album by
ABBA
Released30 November 1981
Recorded16 March – 14 November 1981
StudioPolar, Stockholm
GenrePop
Length37:39
Label
Producer
ABBA chronology
Super Trouper
(1980) 		The Visitors
(1981) 		The Singles: The First Ten Years
(1982)
Singles from The Visitors
  1. "One of Us"
    Released: 7 December 1981
  2. "When All Is Said and Done"
    Released: 23 December 1981
  3. "Head over Heels"
    Released: 19 March 1982
  4. "The Visitors"
    Released: 5 April 1982
Professional ratings
Review scores
SourceRating
AllMusic[2]
Blender[3]
The Daily VaultB+[4]
The Encyclopedia of Popular Music[5]
Pitchfork8.6/10[6]
The Rolling Stone Album Guide[7]
Smash Hits8/10[8]

The Visitors is the eighth studio album by the Swedish pop group ABBA. It was 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.[9] 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 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 digitally recorded and mixed, as well as one of the earliest in history to be pressed on the CD format in 1983.[10] The Visitors has been reissued in digitally remastered form four times—first in 1997, then in 2001, again in 2005 as part of The Complete Studio Recordings box set and most recently in 2012, as part of the "Deluxe Edition" series.

For four decades, The Visitors stood as ABBA's last studio album, until the release of their 2021 album, Voyage.

  1. ^ "Abba | full Official Chart History | Official Charts Company". Official Charts.
  2. ^ "The Visitors". AllMusic. Retrieved 8 January 2012.
  3. ^ Douglas Wolk. "Blender review". Blender. Archived from the original on 4 June 2008. Retrieved 8 December 2016.
  4. ^ Smith, Michael R. (2019). "The Daily Vault Music Reviews : The Visitors". dailyvault.com. Retrieved 17 February 2019.
  5. ^ Larkin, Colin (2007). The Encyclopedia of Popular Music (5th Concise ed.). United Kingdom: Omnibus Press. p. 31. ISBN 978-1-84609-856-7.
  6. ^ Pitchfork review
  7. ^ Berger, Arion (2004). "ABBA". In Brackett, Nathan; Hoard, Christian (eds.). The New Rolling Stone Album Guide (4th ed.). Simon & Schuster. pp. 1–2. ISBN 0-7432-0169-8.
  8. ^ Ellen, Mark (7–20 January 1982). "Albums". Smash Hits: 16.
  9. ^ allmusic ((( The Visitors > Overview )))
  10. ^ Rambarran, Shara (2021). Virtual Music Sound, Music, and Image in the Digital Era. New York: Bloomsbury Academic & Professional. ISBN 978-1-5013-3362-0. OCLC 1236265553.