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While ABBA gave us a lot of great music, only one of the band’s songs reached No. 1 in the United States. Furthermore, it only reached the top of the chart for a short amount of time. The song was a departure from other ABBA songs.

ABBA made some classic songs outside of their typical genre

ABBA was mostly known for perky pop songs with rock ‘n’ roll influences. While the group peaked during the disco era, they generally didn’t write disco music. However, when they did dip their toes into the genre, they wrote classics like “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)” and “Dancing Queen.”

The latter became the group’s only chart-topper in the U.S. The song was No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 for a single week, lasting on the chart for 22 weeks in total. “Dancing Queen” appeared on the album Arrival. That record peaked at No. 20 on the Billboard 200, charting for a total of 50 weeks. Arrival was ABBA’s biggest studio album in the U.S. The record also produced the tune “Money, Money, Money,” which remains popular today, partly due to its appearance in the musical Mamma Mia!

“Dancing Queen” plays an important role in Mamma Mia! as well, but its popularity is really the result of its quality. “Dancing Queen” is a disco song, but it’s less funky and more sugary than most of its musical peers. Perhaps the song sounds so much different from other disco songs because ABBA was a Swedish band while most famous disco artists were American or British. 

A member of ABBA discussed the band’s sound

During a 2014 interview with The Guardian, ABBA’s Björn Ulvaeus said that the band’s formula was once rooted in glam rock music. “If you look at the singles we released straight after ‘Waterloo,’ we were trying to be more like the Sweet, a semi-glam rock group,” he said. “Which was stupid because we were always a pop group.”

Ulvaeus also explained that the group’s music played with listeners’ emotions. “The music of ABBA is not that happy,” he said. “It might sound happy, in some strange way, but deep within it’s not happy music. It has that Nordic melancholic feeling to it. What fools you is the girls’ voices. You know, I do think that is one of the secrets about ABBA. Even when we were really quite sad, we always sounded jubilant.”

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Björn Ulvaeus said the band’s songs were always distinctive

After explaining the band’s formulas, he went on to claim that the group had no formulas at all. “‘Waterloo,’ ‘Mamma Mia!,’ ‘Fernando,’ ‘Dancing Queen,’ ‘The Winner Takes It All’ … are they made to a formula?” he asks. “What is that formula?! It’s totally the opposite. We never repeated ourselves. We worked so hard to find different styles every time.”

It is true that ABBA displayed a lot of range during their hitmaking years. However, it would be ridiculous to claim they never repeated themselves. Listen to “Ring Ring,” “Waterloo,” and “Honey, Honey” all in a row and it’s easy to tell these songs were all written by the same people. 

ABBA could get a bit formulaic and they threw the rulebook out for “Dancing Queen.”

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