The band Dave Grohl said was impossible not to like: “The songs are incredible”

Anyone looking to pick a fight with someone like Dave Grohl is fighting a losing battle. While Grohl has made his fair share of enemies throughout his career, it’s hard to really argue that he has one of the best reputations as the musician’s musician, not being afraid to talk about his favourite bands and give exposure to some of the unsung heroes that he loved as a kid. For someone who sings the praises of hardcore punk as often as Grohl does, he admitted that it’s virtually impossible to hate on anything ABBA did.

When you’ve been listening to nothing but hard rock throughout your career, ABBA feels like the antithesis of everything you’ve ever heard. Grohl was all about the loud guitars and making the kind of songs that get people throwing their fists in the air, so how the hell is the same band that sang songs like ‘Dancing Queen’ on his radar?

Well, if you’ve so much as breathed air in the past 50 years, ABBA’s reign as the Swedish kings and queens of pop is still unrivalled. While some songs are a little too sweet for some and may result in diabetic comas for others, every note sounds immaculate when on the record, including the amazingly tight vocal harmonies on a song like ‘Mamma Mia’.

And for anyone who has ever said that the band didn’t have that much talent, there’s a lot more going on under the hood of their songs as well. Just look at a song like ‘SOS’. Sure, everyone knows the chorus of the song like the back of their hand now, but the intro has more in common with progressive music, throwing in a bar of waltz time in between the standard 4/4 count.

The music does have its complexities, but Grohl considered the pop icons geniuses for being able to make that kind of music palatable to so many people, telling Anderson Cooper, “How can you not love ABBA? There’s a reason why they sold more records than anybody ever. Because the songs are incredible. My kids love ABBA. My mom loves ABBA”.

For those of you still on the fence, allow me to paint a picture for you. Look at a song like ‘Take a Chance on Me’. Most rock listeners would reject this song on principle because it’s too poppy, but in terms of what it’s trying to do, there isn’t a single note out of place, and unless you don’t have a single emotion in your body, it’s hard not to feel something when the rest of the band comes in after that acapella opening.

Grohl has even managed to pick up a few cues from the pop icons along the way. Say what you want to about how Foo Fighters have made straight-ahead rock and roll their whole lives, but there’s no way that Grohl would have had the drive to collaborate with Shawn Stockman of Boyz II Men on the choir section of ‘Concrete and Gold’ if not for ABBA coming first.

It’s not like people are earning cool points for hating on ABBA, either. Sure, they might not be to your taste, but even the biggest names in heavy music have given their props to them, with Corey Taylor of Slipknot and Lemmy calling them one of his favourite bands ever as well. They are about as sugary as it gets in terms of pop music, but if you can bring yourself today that you don’t like anything ABBA ever released, it might be time to check to see if you’re not legally dead.