Seasoned Abba fans will know this song well, but if you are one of those people who think Abba were mere Euro-disco then think again. "The Visitors" is a very different sort of Abba track with dark lyrical content and an exhilerating build to the chorus. Best played loud!
Give this a chance and bear in mind that it's supposed to be about Soviet dissidents waiting on government authorities to come calling. It was released in 1981 as the opening track on the album of the same name which would turn out to be Abba's last ever studio album. It was released as a single in the US in 1982.
This fan-made video re-interprets the lyrics as describing extra terrestrial visitors.
PERFECT POP #2: ABBA - THE VISITORS
I consider it a very good album rather than a truly great one, but it does feature one of the band’s best ever songs in its glorious title track, The Visitors.
The Visitors is arguably ABBA’s most sonically ambitious composition. The first two minutes of the song signal such a significant departure from the group’s classic sound that many listeners at the time must have had to stop the turntable to check that this was definitely an ABBA record and not some obscure psych-prog offering.
The verse features a heavily processed Ani-Frid Lyngstad singing about panic, fear, and secret meetings over pulses of synthesizer and psychedelic swirls of sound. The tension mounts until 2:11, when a crash cymbal announces the arrival of a relatively understated chorus by ABBA's standards. At 2:40 this gives way to gloriously pompous synth-driven instrumental break, and then we’re back to the verse and the song’s titular visitors, who have come to take away and ‘break’ our narrator just in time for the finale.
The song’s lyrics are vague enough to be open to interpretation – in my mind's eye I'm seeing Stasi officers from 2006 film The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen) – but Björn Ulvaeus has claimed that it is about the treatment of dissidents in the Soviet Union at the time. And you thought you knew ABBA? Think again.
If you’re interested in sophisticated pop music with distinctly adult themes (divorce, the loss of innocence, Soviet oppression in the Cold War era) then I would recommend giving the The Visitors a listen. If you think you can only stomach one new ABBA song at time, make it The Visitors. You’ll be coming back for more before you know it.
13 March, 2011 - 16:05 — David Colemanfrom http://www.noripcord.com/features/perfect-pop-2-abba-visitors
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