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When news broke in October 2016 that Swedish pop quartet ABBA would be turned into holograms for a tour, it didn't really register. "Sounds dumb and probably not real," you and I and all of their fans thought to themselves, and then November happened and everything went to shit.

Well, friends, I have some good music news in this week of terrible music news: Agnetha, Benny, Bjorn, and Anni-Frid have decided to record two new songs to go with the project, although their corporeal selves won't actually be performing on the tour.

This morning, news broke of an announcement from the band:

"The decision to go ahead with the exciting ABBA avatar tour project had an unexpected consequence. We all four felt that, after some 35 years, it could be fun to join forces again and go into the recording studio. So we did. And it was like time had stood still and that we only had been away on a short holiday. An extremely joyful experience!... We may have come of age, but the song is new. And it feels good.”
Yes, that's right: All four members of ABBA are making new music together. "I Still Have Faith in You," the first new ABBA song since their final two singles ("The Day Before You Came" and "Under Attack"), will come out this December, when NBC airs a special featuring their digital avatars performing the song.


RELATED: An Abba Calendar for 2016: "Happy New Year" and Other Songs to Get You Through the Next 12 Months [Music, Dec 30, 2015]

I know—this could very well be some sort of dystopian horror... if we were talking about any other band. But this is ABBA, and there is precious little else to be thankful for these days. Perhaps we'll get more than two songs from them, and perhaps not—perhaps it will be easy-listening schmaltz-shlock from a bunch of old Swedes in their 70s (except spring chicken Agnetha, who's a mere 68), and perhaps it will possess the type of unmitigated pop genius that characterized the best of their work. We'll find out. I'm even holding out hope that this could signal a possible rectifying of one of pop history's greatest injustices: that ABBA never recorded a James Bond theme song. (You listening, Danny Boyle?) Meanwhile, the fake ABBA tour is scheduled to happen sometime in 2019. I probably won't go to it. But I will eagerly listen to these two new ABBA songs when they materialize.

Here's ABBA in 1982, just before the breakup. It was a weird hair era for Frida.