访客 (1981)

The Visitors is the eighth studio album by the Swedish pop group ABBA. It was released on 30 November 1981.

With The Visitors, ABBA took several steps away from the "lighter" pop music they had recorded previously and the album is often regarded as a more complex and mature effort. The opening track, "The Visitors", with its ominous synthesizer sounds and the distinctive lead vocal by Frida, announced a change in musical style. With Benny and Frida going their separate ways, the pain of splitting up was explored yet again in "When All Is Said and Done". The major hit single on the album, "One of Us", also depicted the end of a love story. Elsewhere there were Cold War themes—highly topical at the time—and further songs of isolation and regret.

The Visitors was one of the first albums to be digitally recorded and mixed. The Visitors was also one of the earliest to be manufactured commercially on compact disc, it was released after 52nd Street by Billy Joel (the first available in this format). The Visitors has been reissued in digitally remastered form four times—first in 1997, then in 2001, again in 2005 as part of The Complete Studio Recordings box set and most recently in 2012, as part of the "Deluxe Edition" series.

For four decades, The Visitors stood as ABBA's last studio album, until the release of their 2021 album, Voyage.

Recording and release

Recording began on what was to become ABBA's eighth studio album on 16 March 1981. By this time, tensions in ABBA had heightened. Björn Ulvaeus and Agnetha Fältskog had divorced in July 1980, while the band's other couple, Benny Andersson and Anni-Frid Lyngstad, announced their divorce in February 1981, adding strain to the musical partnership. Ulvaeus mentioned in retrospect that the sessions were troubled, noting, "It could be frosty sometimes." Lyngstad also commented that they were beginning to be tired of working together.

The members of ABBA and their personnel have memories of the recording sessions for this album being rather difficult. To begin with, their sound engineer Michael Tretow had to become accustomed to using the new 32-track digital recorder that had been purchased for Polar Music Studios. He said, "Digital recording...cut out all the hiss, but it also meant that sounds were sharply cut off below a certain level. The sound simply became too clean, so I had to find ways of compensating for that". The first three tracks for the album had already been recorded using analogue tape and therefore Tretow had to transfer all subsequent tracks from digital to analogue and back again to avoid a difference in quality.

On its release, The Visitors reached the top of the charts in a number of territories but was not as successful as the band's previous albums.

On 1 December 2023, The Visitors was reissued as a multi-format release for its delayed 40th anniversary celebration. It included: a double-LP half-speed mastered version of the album, done by Miles Showell at Abbey Road Studios, pressed on 45 rpm 180 g black vinyl; a colored vinyl 7-inch singles box set of "Head Over Heels", "One of Us", "The Day Before You Came", and "Under Attack" (the latter two being from The Singles: The First Ten Years); and individual 7" picture discs of these four singles.

Deluxe edition

The Visitors was reissued on 23 April 2012, as a CD and DVD deluxe edition set. The first disc consisted of a remastered version of the original album, with seven bonus tracks. Featured among them were: a version of "Should I Laugh or Cry" with a brief count-in, from the original United Kingdom and South African 7" release; "I Am the City", recorded in 1982 and released in 1993, on More ABBA Gold: More ABBA Hits; and, particularly, the 9-minute demo medley "From a Twinkling Star to a Passing Angel". This collection of demos, put together by Benny Andersson, showcased the evolution of "Like an Angel Passing Through My Room", offered insights into ABBA's recording process, and was, at the time, the first release of unheard archive material since 1994's Thank You for the Music box set.

The second disc included the following television material: the performances of "Two for the Price of One" and "Slipping Through My Fingers" from the Dick Cavett Meets ABBA special; the original promo clip of "When All Is Said and Done"; two promotional appearances by the band, from The Late, Late Breakfast Show (BBC) and Nöjesmaskinen (SVT), titled "ABBA In London, November 1982" and "ABBA In Stockholm, November 1982", respectively; four television commercials: two for The Visitors and two for The Singles: The First Ten Years; and the "International Sleeve Gallery". The set also came with a 24-page booklet with an essay on the making of the album.