The Album (ABBA album)
| ABBA: The Album | ||||
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| Studio album by ABBA | ||||
| Released | 12 December 1977 | |||
| Recorded | 31 May – 22 November 1977 | |||
| Studio | Marcus, Metronome and Glen Studios, Stockholm and Bohus Studio, Kungälv | |||
| Length | 40:01 (Polar LP 1977) | |||
| Label |
Polar Epic (UK) Atlantic (US original release) |
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| Producer | ||||
| ABBA chronology | ||||
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| Original UK album cover | ||||
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| Professional ratings | |
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| Review scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| Allmusic |   |
| NME | 7/10 |
| Rolling Stone | favorable |
ABBA: The Album is the fifth studio album by the Swedish pop group ABBA. It was released in Scandinavia on 12 December 1977 through Polar Music, but due to the massive pre-orders the UK pressing plants were not able to press sufficient copies before Christmas 1977 and so it was not released in the UK until January 1978. The album was released in conjunction with ABBA: The Movie, with several of the songs featured in the film.
The album contained two UK number-one singles, "Take a Chance on Me" and "The Name of the Game", as well as European hits "Eagle" and "Thank You for the Music".
The album includes three songs from ABBA's 1977 tour mini-musical The Girl with the Golden Hair. These songs are "Thank You for the Music", "I Wonder (Departure)" and "I'm a Marionette". Altogether the album contained just nine songs—the least of any ABBA album, but were longer in length than previous albums (opening track "Eagle" runs to nearly six minutes).
ABBA: The Album reached No. 1 in many territories. In the UK it debuted at the top and remained there for seven weeks, ending up as the third biggest selling album of the year (behind the movie soundtrack LPs of Saturday Night Fever and Grease). In the US it became their highest charting album, where during 1978 ABBA undertook a big promotional campaign. Due to the Cold War, Western music was actively discouraged throughout Eastern Europe at the time. Despite this, ABBA: The Album sold an unprecedented one million copies in Poland in 1977, exhausting the country's entire allocation of foreign currency. In Russia, only 200,000 copies were permitted to be pressed; however, demand within the USSR indicated they could have sold 40 million copies.
ABBA: The Album was first released on CD in 1984. The album has been reissued in the format by PolyGram (later Universal Music) four times; first in 1997, then in 2001, in 2005 as part of The Complete Studio Recordings box set and again in 2007 as a two disc 'Deluxe Edition'.
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