Weve Been Thinking About Holograms All Wrong

Forget reanimating dead musicians. This technology is for living performers who can't stand their bandmates.

- Lane Brown

ABBA'S MUSIC is immortal, Swedishly engineered to flood listeners' brains with dopamine until the sun explodes. The band itself, though, was never built to last. Its lineup included two married couples-Agnetha Fältskog and Björn Ulvaeus, and Benny Andersson and Anni-Frid Lyngstadwhose relationships ended in double divorce, triggering the group's 1982 split. ABBA's original career spanned just a decade; they stayed broken up for the next four, even while the Mamma Mia! movies and a relentlessly popular greatest-hits album made them more famous in this century than they'd been in the previous one. They were once offered $1 billion to reunite, but seemingly nothing could compel them back into business with their former spouses. "Money is not a factor," Ulvaeus once said. "We will never appear onstage again."

But then, this past May, they did. The occasion was the opening night of ABBA Voyage, their new virtual-concert residency in London, and they were there to take a bow for a performance they had not (technically) given. Voyage stars computer-generated clones of the band designed to look and sound like their 1979 selves. The real members, now in their 70s, spent a month in motion-capture suits working out the choreography but can now relax at home-separately-while their "ABBAtars" play "Dancing Queen," "Fernando," and "Waterloo" seven times a week, aided by a ten-piece live orchestra.