Nightmare Fuel / ABBA

• "The Day Before You Came" is renowned for this - not only is the music creepy, but so are the lyrics - and it couldn't be more of a contrast to what ABBA was known for before. The song simply tells the story of a woman's mundane workday, all happening 'the day before you came'. The listener never fully finds out who 'you' is. Frida's operatic wailing in the background doesn't help the creepy feel either.
  • Word of God says the narrator "was living in a sort of gloominess" before a man entered her life and gave it meaning and happiness. Now though she is "back in that same sense of gloom. He has left her, and her life has returned to how it ‘must have been’ before she met him."
• You can't NOT be disturbed by "I'm a Marionette".
  • Especially if one remembers that: 1) This is from the same album as "Thank you for the music" (and is implied to be the ultimate fate of that girl), and 2) This came from a group that ended in Creator Breakdown.
  • Not making matters better is that Ghost covered it. And yet, if YouTube comments are anything to go by, ABBA's version is considered the more sinister of the two.
• "The Visitors". It's been theorized to be about either a kidnapping, an alien abduction, a political prisoner's arrest, or a psychotic breakdown. Take your pick. Officially, the correct answer is the political prisoner one...
• "Head Over Heels" has bizarrely creepy music, and its sequencing immediately after "The Visitors" is a big part of the reason why the album gained a reputation for being unusually dark. Thankfully the lyrics are lighthearted, being about an impulsive woman and her Henpecked Husband.
• "Elaine" is also very nightmare-ish once you listen to the lyrics. "They tie your hands and tie your feet".
  • "They have your mind, they'll take your soul" - was the poor girl captured by a cult?!
• From the box-set Thank You For The Music, we have "Dream World", which has rather creepy circus music in its intro. It's not helped by the way it fades in, like music in a nightmare (this was due to tape damage, apparently). Thankfully, when the song was included on the Voulez-Vous deluxe edition, it had a clean start, though it is still rather creepy.
• You might have noticed a blonde girl looking into the side window of the car (next to Björn's head) on the ABBA cover, but you probably didn't notice the girl in the back window between Frida and Benny.◊
• "The Piper" is ostensibly about The Pied Piper of Hamelin, but it goes deeper than that. The lyrics imply that the song's title character has a much deeper agenda than just getting back at a town for cheating him-he's a Dark Messiah who charms people into giving him power. Word of God says the song was inspired by Stephen King's The Stand series, but it could just as easily apply to any number of other tyrants, from fictional ones like Emepror Palpatine to real ones like Hitler. The sinister music makes the song all the more eerie.
• "Waterloo" is about resigning oneself to a toxic relationship, indicating abuse with lines such as:
  Waterloo, I was defeated, you won the war
  Waterloo, promise to love you forever more
  Waterloo, couldn't escape if I wanted to
  Waterloo, knowing my fate is to be with you
  My my, I tried to hold you back, but you were stronger
  Oh yeah, now it seems my only chance is giving up the fight