ABBA - Summer Night City

What this video is

Released in September 1978, 'Summer Night City' arrived during ABBA's transition from peak global dominance toward a more experimental creative phase. The single marked an early foray into a harder, compression-driven disco sound that the band themselves were ambivalent about, yet it charted strongly across Europe, reaching number one in Sweden, Ireland, and Finland, and number five in the UK. The promo film, shot…

Why it matters

Represents a pivotal transitional document in ABBA's catalogue: the group's most disco-aligned single, recorded during early Voulez-Vous sessions, and one of the first ABBA promos to foreground urban nocturnal location photography. The video anticipates the city-centric aesthetic that would define…

The director

Lars Sven 'Lasse' Hallström (born 2 June 1946, Stockholm, Sweden) is a Swedish film director who first became known for directing almost all music videos by ABBA between 1974 and 1982, and also directed their 1977 concert film ABBA: The Movie. He later…