(See also The Day Before You Came.)Īnd so it goes for Under Attack, with choppy synths underpinning slow, drawling guitar. That said, in the pursuit of a more modern sound, long-standing ABBA producer/engineer Michael Tretow had taken to gating Benny’s legato synth playing in time with the hi-hat or other percussion to produce a more mechanical, modern edge. However, throughout their entire output, ABBA never used a sequencer, and, while big fans of the drum machine and the vocoder, all their keyboard parts were played by Benny himself. It’s easy to forget what an electronic band ABBA were, with synths driving Voulez-Vouz, being perfected through Super Trouper and giving way to prominence on The Visitors. Under AttackĪnother latecomer, Under Attack was also birthed during the band’s final 1982 sessions alongside the aborted and unreleased Just Like That, which shares Under Attack’s chords and verse melody (listen carefully to its unfinished, unreleased mix here). And to get a real fix on such a delicate and rarefied melody, do check out this version from Benny’s exemplary 2017 album Piano. In fact, such was the band’s disappointment in its performance that when UK electronic band Blancmange proposed a near-identical (and near-pointless) cover version in 1984, ABBA publicly endorsed the track to the degree that they even allowed the band to hijack parts of their video, with Agnetha now appearing to share a train with Blancmange’s Neil Arthur, rather than her nameless love interest in the original.
Remarkably, it remains unclear lyrically as to whether the real-time ‘today’ of the song - the day after they ‘came’ - is actually better or worse than the day before… Is this a song looking back fondly before things went wrong? Or celebrating the moment when things finally started to go right? The jury remains out.ĭespite its utter brilliance - and it being a Benny favourite - the song only reached number 32 in the UK charts, which must have played a part in further sealing the band’s reluctance to re-join the ABBA circus post Chess (see later). It tells the story of the boring, repetitive day to day of the protagonist before the interference of a new romance. The band had returned to the studio in May 1982 to follow up The Visitors album, but only six tracks were recorded - two new singles and their B-sides plus I’m The City (which finally surfaced on 1993’s More ABBA Gold) and the unfinished Just Like That (which morphed to become Under Attack).ĭespite its cheek-to-cheek, sexy tango-vibes, TDBYC is a profoundly bleak, 100% electronic ‘sad banger’ before such a thing ever existed, and very much a continuation of the ‘divorce ABBA’ they coined on The Visitors. So much so, that BOTH make our final five. It’d be easy, therefore, to dismiss these two late additions as a cash-grab, designed to prize out a last tuppence alongside tracks already owned, were it not for the fact that both tracks are superb.
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