The Visitors

Recording began on 16 March 1981 at Polar Music Studios in Stockholm, with Tretow engineering and the four regular session musicians, Lasse Wellander, Rutger Gunnarsson, Ola Brunkert and Åke Sundqvist. Andersson and Lyngstad had announced their divorce about four weeks earlier, and Ulvaeus recalled that the sessions could be frosty. The last session was a mix of Soldiers on 14 November.

It was one of the first albums to be recorded and mixed digitally. Tretow had to get used to a new 32-track digital recorder bought for the studio. The first three tracks had been recorded on analogue tape, so he moved every later track from digital to analogue and back again to keep the sound consistent. He said digital recording removed the hiss but also cut sounds off sharply below a certain level.

The songs took in the split between Andersson and Lyngstad, solitude and cold-war fear. When All Is Said and Done, which Ulvaeus wrote about the split between Andersson and Lyngstad, was sung by Lyngstad, who said her sadness was captured in it. Slipping Through My Fingers came from Ulvaeus watching his seven-year-old daughter Linda walk off to school, and Fältskog sang the lead. The title song was about dissidents in the Soviet Union, and Soldiers, sung by Fältskog, touched on the cold-war threat of world destruction. I Let the Music Speak, sung by Lyngstad, was built like a theatre number, and Ulvaeus later said that if ABBA had not recorded it they would have used it in Chess. Andersson and Ulvaeus met the lyricist Tim Rice about that musical two weeks after the album was released.

Rune Söderqvist designed the cover around an angel, linking the album title to the closing track, Like an Angel Passing Through My Room. Photographer Lasse Larsson shot the group in painter Julius Kronberg's atelier at Skansen in Stockholm, in front of a giant angel painting. It was the first ABBA album cover to show the members as separate individuals rather than a close group.

The album topped the charts across most of Europe, including Ireland, the UK and Germany, but it sold less well than its predecessors and declined in France, Australia and Japan. It was banned in the Soviet Union in 1982. Writing about the 2012 deluxe edition in Pitchfork, Tom Ewing said the music was more pristine and ambitious than ever and its themes darker, and that the album had become a perennial critic's favorite. The Arts Desk called it not their best album but their most interesting, pointing to where Ulvaeus and Andersson would go next. Until Voyage in 2021 it was ABBA's last studio album.