The Cover Band That Made the Original Irrelevant

Four Swedish teenagers covered ABBA better than ABBA ever covered themselves, and almost nobody wants to admit this. The A*Teens—assembled in Stockholm in 1998 through a talent search run by Stockholm Records, later absorbed into Universal—took "Mamma Mia," "Super Trouper," and "Dancing Queen" and ran them through a Eurodance filter that stripped out all the polyester and replaced it with something you could actually move to in 1999. The result was an album called The ABBA Generation that got played to death on VIVA and deserved every second of airtime it received.

The lineup: John Dhani Lennevald, Sara Helena Lumholdt, Amit Sebastian Paul, and Marie Eleonor Serneholt, who was remarkable in the specific way that certain pop performers are remarkable at exactly the right moment in your adolescence. They spent most of 2000 on tour with *NSYNC and Britney Spears, which is not a sentence you’d use to describe a minor act. They were operating at the top of that particular food chain.

ABBA announced their return in 2018—two new songs, a reunion that various music outlets treated as a cultural event of some significance. And sure, good for them. Nice for the sixtysomething housewives, the devotees of Swedish pop heritage, the people who’d been keeping that flame alive for forty years and deserved to see it rewarded. But the A*Teens already solved the problem. They took the songs, updated them for a generation that didn’t need the original production context, and made something genuinely new out of them. That’s the harder trick.

ABBA is an institution. The A*Teens are the reason I actually know those songs. The distinction matters to me and approximately no one else, but here we are.