ABBA have smashed to No.1 in the UK album chart today (12) with Voyage, becoming the market’s fastest-selling album of 2021.
The first album in 40 years by the Swedish superstars delivered a spectacular total of 204,000 chart sales in its first seven days on release, ending last night at midnight. That’s not only the UK’s best of the year, but the highest opening tally since Ed Sheeran’s Divide four years ago.
Among other achievements, the Official Charts Company reports that ABBA’s first-week figure is the biggest for a group since One Direction’s Midnight Memories eight years ago, in November 2013. ABBA become only the fourth act in the past decade to surpass 200,000 UK chart sales in release week. The other artists in that exalted group are Adele with 25, in November 2015 and Sheeran with the aforementioned Divide, in March 2017.
“We are so happy that our fans seem to have enjoyed our new album as much as we enjoyed making it!,” ABBA told the OCC. “We are absolutely over the moon to have an album at the top of the charts again!”
Perhaps even more remarkably, a massive 90% of the sales of Voyage came in physical copies, including 29,900 on vinyl. That makes it the fastest-selling vinyl release of the century, well ahead of the 24,500 opening total for Arctic Monkeys’ Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino in 2018.
This is also ABBA’s 58th week at No.1 on the UK album chart, a total surpassed only by The Beatles and Elvis Presley. Only seven other acts have amassed more chart-topping UK albums: The Beatles, Presley, the Rolling Stones, Robbie Williams, Madonna, Bruce Springsteen, and David Bowie.
ABBA first topped the UK album bestsellers in May 1976 with their Greatest Hits set, and most recently with another compilation, Gold, when it returned to the summit in August 2008.
Buy or stream ABBA’s Voyage album.
