Abba Gold: Greatest Hits

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The children who grew up with ABBA omnipresent on the radio were maturing into punk, rap, and new wave; the adults who enjoyed their lighthearted, melodic hits were less interested in minimally arranged character studies. The track listing was similar to the original album, with some added content: a 25-minute documentary produced in 1999, and the 1992 video of "Dancing Queen". McGregor said: “Imagine: growing up in the north of England in the 70s and learning to ballroom, Latin and disco dance to the incredible songs of Abba.

In 2017, Andersson elaborated on the project, saying: “It will take a bit of time, it takes time to digitalise a face. In 2014, Lyngstad said: “We only have one answer and that is no … No amount of money would change our minds. The tumult of the band’s personal lives began to subtly leak into their art: “Knowing Me, Knowing You” and “The Winner Takes It All” are crushing glimpses at marriages in disrepair, sung by adults who know they can’t help but carry on with their lives. In the decade since ABBA’s collapse, CDs had become the dominant form of physical media and were accelerating toward their turn-of-the-century peak. This article was updated with a correction: Abba won the Eurovision Song Contest with Waterloo in 1974, not 1971.

As of July 2021, "Gold" became the first album to reach 1000 weeks on the Official Charts in United Kingdom with pure sales of 5. If the ideal greatest hits collection captures the fundamental truth about an artist, stitches them into an enduring place in our cultural fabric, and sells enough copies to fund the purchase of a minor island, then ABBA Gold—a 79-minute buffet of schlocky ballads, elegant pop delicacies, and disco heat rocks—is the definitive example of the format. Their romantic strife was explored with great candour in songs such as The Winner Takes It All, and in the psychodramas of their final album in 1981. As the division of labor between Andersson and Ulvaeus became clearer later in the band’s discography—the former handled most of the music, the latter wrote the bulk of the lyrics—the divide between subject matter and sound became even more pronounced.

And yet Gold still conveys the one thing you absolutely need to know about the band: For about a decade, these four Swedes cracked the code on pop music. This new edition will actually be a three-CD set, presented in a digi-pack, and will feature the standard 19-track compilation on disc one, the More ABBA Gold set on disc two, and a third CD made up of B-sides (see full track listing below). In 2010, the DVD was remastered with six bonus clips, including five "split-screen" versions of the clips to show which improvements were made by remastering the old videos.From a distance, it must have seemed unlikely that ABBA would explode back into the popular consciousness and stay there indefinitely. The Australasian release featured the European track list, not the Australasian track list on previous issues. Listening to Gold with fresh, focused ears, I was struck by the sheer variety of sounds beneath its blinding polish. They had collectively played thousands of tour dates across Sweden, produced music for dozens of other artists, and spent untold hours working as a songwriting and performing team. And if the commercial potential of ABBA’s music wasn’t already evident, it became impossible to ignore in mid-1992 when Erasure’s cover EP Abba-esque topped the charts across the UK and continental Europe.

Originally, PolyGram planned to release a box set was by the end of 1992, however this idea was simplified to just a greatest hits package: this is what would end up becoming Gold: Greatest Hits, a 19 track collection of the most well-known ABBA songs.

The 2008 releases include a single edit of "Eagle" and full original versions of "The Visitors" and "Lovelight". Writing for Pitchfork in 2019, reviewer Jamieson Cox agreed, describing Gold: Greatest Hits as a "refined package with surprising emotional range".