ABBA star Benny Andersson has given an update into the group’s upcoming new material, insisting they’re not concerned about living up to their past legacy.
Last week, Benny and his former bandmates revealed that they had reunited to record two new songs, one of which will be debuted at the end of this year in a TV special.
Speaking to BBC News, he admitted he and the rest of the band “don’t feel that we have to prove anything”, insisting: “I don’t feel we have to think about, ‘Oh, what if it was better before?’ Maybe it was, but we can’t care about that. We do it because we think it was a good thing to do.
“We enjoyed it very much. We’ll see. I hope you’ll like them.”
Benny says that he and Björn Ulvaeus - with whom he co-wrote all of ABBA’s back catalogue - had the idea to go back into the studio together when they were working on their upcoming “avatar” tour project.
He explained: “We said, ‘Hmmm... maybe we should try and write a couple of songs, ask the ladies if they want to come in and sing’. And they said, ‘Yeah, absolutely’. So it was just, out of pure joy I’d say.
“One of the songs is like we would’ve written it [for] today. The other, we could’ve written in 1972. So I don’t know, we’ll see. I mean, they’re not finished yet.
“We have the vocals, they’re all recorded, we haven’t mixed it, we haven’t worked them through, really, but I think they’re pretty good.”
The two new tracks, ‘I Still Have Faith With You’ and ‘Don’t Shut Me Down’, will debut as part of an upcoming TV special, produced by the BBC and US network NBC.
