ABBA’s Björn Ulvaeus discusses making band’s “ABBA-tar” versions for upcoming performance

Last year, we were blessed by the Swedish pop gods ABBA when they released their first new album after 40 years, Voyage. Of course, new music traditionally marks performances for said album and Agnetha, Björn, Benny and Anni-Frid would not disappoint. Instead of any old concert, the pop group will be performing with a 10-piece live band at the newly dubbed ABBA Arena in London—as digitally de-aged versions of themselves.

Marked on their website as “a concert 40 years in the making,” ABBA founding member Björn Ulvaeus recently spoke about the upcoming all-digital performance in an interview with CNBC.

“The risk is, of course, that people won’t find it to be the experience that I think and hope it will be. That is the main thing,” says Ulvaeus about concern’s over the band’s digital avatars. “If people would go from the concert thinking, yeah, well, that wasn’t bad but…We want them to feel, you know, emotional and to feel that they’ve gone through something that they’ve never seen before.”

Using motion capture suits that were probably the least-craziest things they’ve worn, the band members performed their whole 90 minute set on a special studio in Stockholm, Sweden to craft their “ABBA-tar” copies.

“It was weird at first,” says Ulvaeus when thinking back to motion-capture process. “I mean, I was looking around and there’s Agnetha doing her stuff, and Benny, just like the old days. But in the end, it was fun.”

Though the technology to create these holographic versions of musicians isn’t anything new—2Pac and Michael Jackson have famously had digital performances—Ulvaeus says ABBA are “pioneers” in having a full concert to this scale as their digital selves.

“We are pioneers in this field, to make avatars, to build digital copies that are as human beings—to the pores, through the hairs in the nose, through everything [it] will make you feel after a while that this is a human being, this is not digital, this is a video of a human being, and it’s great fun to be the pioneer and to do it in this context,” he said.

We’ve already gotten a glimpse of the de-aged dancing queens/kings wearing TRON-like neon lit suits in a trailer for the event, grooving to their song “Summer Night City” off the 1979 album, Voulez-Vous. Their digital selves will reunite on May 27 at the ABBA Arena in London.