A Subjective Top Ten — The Best ABBA Songs
“Mamma mia, here we go again…”
From the irresistable energy of “Waterloo” and “Super Trouper” to the captivating lyrics of “Fernando” and “Slipping Through My Fingers”, ABBA’s music has made people dance and cry for decades. It has also heavily influenced today’s music scene and arguably given birth to pop as we know it.
In light of the Swedish quartet’s impressive discography, it seems impossible to even compile a list of the fifty best ABBA songs, let alone a top ten. Yet, with the release of both the feelgood movie Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again and Cher’s cover album Dancing Queen, this is the perfect time to attempt the impossible.
Expect quite a few massive hits to be missing from this list — and one or two songs on it that you had completely forgotten about.
Now, without further ado, here we go (again).
10. “Super Trouper”
(from Super Trouper, 1980)
Granted, that “supa-pa, troupa-pa” bit floats somewhere in between fun and annoying, but everything else about this song is flawless. Showcasing ABBA’s ability to turn any situation into a lyrically unique and catchy-as-hell pop song, “Super Trouper” marries fantastic verses with a sing-along chorus to create a glittering and sleek pop moment that peeks in the emotionally charged bridge.
9. “Happy New Year”
(from Super Trouper, 1980)
You may be a little tired of this song, given that it’s become the New Year’s Eve equivalent of “Last Christmas”. But even if you have heard “Happy New Year” a little too often by now, you cannot deny that it’s a brilliantly written song that beautifully contrasts a joyful party setting with dark musings about past and future.
Agnetha sings some of the best ever ABBA lines on this track, including “sometimes I see how the brave new world arrives and I see how it thrives in the ashes of our lives” as well as “seems to me now that the dreams we had before are all dead, nothing more than confetti on the floor”. While the Swedish band may nowadays be mostly known for its happy-go-lucky uptempo cuts, these lyrics remind us that ABBA have time and again moved beyond the shallow love songs that characterise pop music.
8. “So Long”
(from ABBA, 1975)
Curiously, this track is often overlooked in conversations about ABBA. It also hasn’t been featured in either of the two Mamma Mia movies, even though it was the lead single of the self-titled ABBA album that followed the world-wide smash Waterloo.
Compared to other ABBA songs, “So Long” is decidedly rockier, but without losing the superb melodies that made the band so successful. In fact, the chorus is probably among the catchiest ABBA hooks. With its bold lyrics and its overdose of attitude, “So Long” deserves far more love than it’s currently receiving.
7. “Slipping Through My Fingers”
(from The Visitors, 1981)
Given numerous brand new fans through Meryl Streep and Amanda Seyfried’s emotional performance in the first Mamma Mia movie, this ballad is among ABBA’s very finest.
Released on the band’s final and by far moodiest album The Visitors, “Slipping Through My Fingers” perfectly describes a parent’s thoughts about how fast their daughter is growing up, addressing “the feeling that I’m loosing her forever — and without really entering her world.” Later the parent wonders, “what happened to the wonderful adventures, the places I had planned for us to go? Well, some of that we did but most we didn’t, and why, I just don’t know.”
How very relatable.
6. “Waterloo”
(from Waterloo, 1974)
Of course the song the catapulted ABBA to international mega-stardom cannot be missing from this list. When ABBA decided to ditch the comparatively safe bet “Hasta Mañana” for the silly-but-fun Europop cut “Waterloo” in preparation for the 1974 Eurovision Song Contest, nobody could have guessed what an impact that choice would make on the music scene.
Sounding decidedly like a global take on German Schlager music, “Waterloo” brims with silly history references, cheesy lines, and — most importantly — feelgood vibes, capturing the butterflies-in-your-stomach feeling of falling in love like few other songs do. As such, the track certainly doesn’t feature the best ABBA lyrics, nor does it have the best hooks, but it’s the band’s most unabashadely fun song — and perhaps its most influential.
Also, Anni-Frid, Agnetha, Benny, and Björn were serving looks in that music video. Remember for yourself:
5. “One Of Us”
(from The Visitors, 1981)
The fun times are over. From the happy early days of “Waterloo” we jump to ABBA’s final studio album The Visitors and its depressing lead single, which would become the band’s very last #1 cut.
By the time “One Of Us” and its parent album were written, both ABBA couples had separated, and the atmosphere in the band had clearly changed for the worse. It’s remarkable that this led to what is arguably the quartet’s best album — and to one of the greatest break-up songs of all time.
“One Of Us” not only features relatable and witty lines (think of that “one of us is lying . . . in her lonely bed” bit in the chorus), it also has a truly outstanding midtempo chorus hook. While the inclusion of the track in Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again (re)introduced it to a large audience, it remains highly underrated.
(…as does Anni-Frid’s hair from the music video. The 80s had arrived in full force.)
4. “Mamma Mia”
(from ABBA, 1975)
Perhaps ABBA’s most well-known song, “Mamma Mia” was interestingly only released as the fifth(!) single from the album ABBA, after “So Long”, “I’ve Been Waiting For You”, “I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do”, and “SOS”, all of which it continues to overshadow to this day.
What makes “Mamma Mia” such a great track, you ask? Well, do you know any other pop song that is so heartbreaking and so fun at the same time, flawlessly capturing the conflicting emotions brought about by love? And do you know any other pop song that has already gone through no less than five infectious hooks by 1:20?
There you have your answer.
3. “Angel Eyes”
(from Voulez-Vous, 1979)
“A-ha-ha. A-ha-ha, ha-ha-ha.”
Are you already hooked? If not, just wait for the first verse that miraculously manages to squeeze quite a few precise (for pop standards) descriptions into short lines and catchy melodies. If even that doesn’t convince you, listen to the timeless chorus that makes you want to dance through your room while making dramatic gestures, allowing you to — somehow —address your heartbreak and forget about it at the same time.
If by now you still haven’t fallen in love with this masterpiece, you’re probably reading the wrong article.
“Angel Eyes” is not one of ABBA’s most famous songs, though just why that isn’t the case is one of the great mysteries of pop music. The track takes the sad-yet-happy formula of “Mamma Mia” that the ABBA members do so well and translates it into an even more glorious pop moment.
THIS, ladies and gentlemen and everyone else, is how you do pop music.
2. “Fernando”
(from Greatest Hits, 1976)
It’s not unusual for a band to have its biggest hit with a love ballad. But it’s highly unusual for said ballad to detail the war between Texas and Mexico and feature lines like “the roar of guns and cannons almost made me cry.”
Enter ABBA and their already mentioned ability to make a catchy pop song out of anything. In fact, as beloved as the band is, Benny and Björn don’t receive enough credit for the sheer brilliance of their songwriting. There are hardly any other songwriters out there — if any — that share the two men’s knack for translating complex stories and feelings into short lines and irresistable hooks.
With the melancholy that pervades its verses and the celebratory and defiant tone of its timeless chorus, “Fernando” is arguably the (second-)best example of ABBA’s skills, and undeniably among the greatest ballads of all time.
Honourable Mentions:
“The Winner Takes It All” — the dramatic Super Trouper ballad that inspired Meryl Streep’s legendary scarf-rography from Mamma Mia.
“Honey Honey” — the famous Waterloo cut that is the sweetest song about how great someone is in bed that you’ll ever hear.
“Another Town, Another Train” — the folky standout track from ABBA’s debut album Ring Ring.
“The Name Of The Game” — the perfect falling-in-love song from ABBA: The Album that Taylor Swift and co. have been trying to write for decades.
“Does Your Mother Know” — the fun Benny and Björn cut from Voulez-Vous that Christine-high-kicking-bitch-Baranski gave new life to in Mamma Mia.
“I Am The City” — the little-known masterpiece from ABBA’s planned successor to their last album The Visitors.
1. “The Visitors”
(from The Visitors, 1981)
If this were a top ten list of the most criminally underrated songs of all time, the title track of ABBA’s final studio album would still be number one. “The Visitors” is a shining beacon of songwriting that takes the “Fernando”-formula to an even higher level.
The almost-six-minutes behemoth starts slowly with a lyrically and sonically depressing double verse that details the emotional turmoil of a terrified character, who hears the visitors of the song’s title outside their door. It’s heavily implied that the character is a political dissident and that the visitors in question represent forces sent by the state to arrest the dissident. While ABBA never confirmed that the track is specifially about the Soviet Union, it was, for obvious reasons, banned in that area and only released as a single in the US — where it became ABBA’s last charting track.
When the double verse ends, leaving the listener in a similarly tense state as the petrified character, “The Visitors” suddenly drops a musical bomb. The chorus kicks in and — surprise, suprise — it’s an electronic art-rock extravaganza that turns the track into an intriguing kind of strangely dancy protest song. The “now I hear them moving, muffled noises coming through the door, I feel I’m crackin’ up” bit is insanely catchy in a unique way, injecting a heavy dose of traditional ABBAism into the gloomy world painted by the verses. A genius instrumental post-chorus keeps the drama and energy up, before a second verse begins and the cycle starts again.
“The Visitors” is a far cry from the glittery spandex days of “Waterloo” and “Mamma Mia”, but it showcases ABBA’s songwriting better than any other song from their impressive discography. It’s hard enough to write a catchy, original-sounding pop song. But it’s that much harder to make it gloomy, content-heavy, and dancy at the same time.
With “The Visitors”, ABBA have succeeded and created what is definitely one of the top ten pop songs of all time.
