For Fans of ABBA

By 1981 ABBA were supposed to be over. Their marriages had collapsed, the disco boom had burned out, and the critics were circling. Instead they made The Visitors: cold, strange, synthesizer-heavy, and genuinely unsettled. Songs like 'The Day Before You Came' were not pop in any conventional sense. They were dispatches from people who had lived inside success long enough to find it hollow. The album sold well and was then ignored for twenty years, until the rest of pop caught up.

The 2008 film is loud, chaotic, and performed with an abandon that the awards-season crowd cannot forgive. But that abandon is the point. Meryl Streep singing 'The Winner Takes It All' is not a precise vocal performance; it is a woman letting something she has held onto for thirty years come apart in public. The film trusts the songs to do the emotional heavy lifting, and the songs are good enough to carry it.

Simogo's 2019 rhythm-action game runs on a simple premise: heartbreak as an arcade sequence. The pastel synth-pop score, the cascading color palettes, and the way stages dissolve into each other all carry the same DNA as ABBA's late-period records. It does not quote them. It thinks like them: pop as emotional geometry, precision in the service of feeling.

Taylor Jenkins Reid's novel (and the Amazon adaptation) is fascinated by the same question ABBA raises: what happens to the people inside the machine when the machine works perfectly. The fictional band at its centre is not a disguised ABBA, but the emotional architecture is identical: two creative partnerships, two romantic partnerships, all four overlapping in ways that make great records and terrible personal decisions.