It begins with a piano, alone and unadorned, playing a melody so mournful it sounds like someone knocking on a door in an empty house. Then a woman’s voice enters, raw and breaking, singing about a love that has gone wrong and a heart that cannot find its way back. When ABBA released “SOS” in 1975, it was the most emotionally exposed record the group had ever made, and it arrived at the exact moment their career needed saving. A year earlier they had conquered Europe with “Waterloo,” winning the Eurovision Song Contest and becoming overnight stars. But the follow-up singles had faltered, the world was beginning to whisper that they might be a one-hit wonder, and the four Swedes were running out of time to prove otherwise. “SOS” was their answer: a three-letter distress call, sent out in a minor key, that turned out to be the song that made ABBA, ABBA.
To understand why the song mattered, you have to understand where ABBA stood in the summer of 1974. They were not newcomers, exactly, but they were not yet the institution they would become. Agnetha Fältskog, Björn Ulvaeus, Benny Andersson and Anni-Frid Lyngstad had won Eurovision in Brighton in April 1974 with “Waterloo,” a glittering, glam-rock burst of pop that shot to number one across Europe and even reached the American Top 10. It should have been the launch of a world-conquering career. Instead, the momentum stalled almost immediately. The singles that followed — “Ring Ring,” already released before Eurovision, and then “So Long,” a brash rocker chosen as the first single from their new album sessions — failed to make a dent on the international charts. In Britain, the country that had crowned them, the follow-ups barely registered. The group that had seemed unstoppable in the spring suddenly looked like it might be a footnote by Christmas. Their manager, Stig Anderson, and the two songwriters, Benny and Björn, knew the next album had to contain something undeniable. They just did not know, at first, that they already had it.
The song had begun in a Stockholm suburb in August 1974, in circumstances far less dramatic than the record would sound. On August 22 and 23, ABBA entered Glenstudio in Stocksund to begin recording their third album, the one that would simply be called ABBA. The backing tracks for three songs were laid down in that first session: “So Long,” “Man in the Middle,” and a third song that did not yet have its final title. Its working title was “Turn Me On,” a plain, functional label for a melody Benny had written on piano. The musicians on the session were Benny on keyboards and Björn on guitar, alongside the session players who graced so many ABBA recordings: Janne Schaffer on guitar, Mike Watson on bass and Ola Brunkert on drums. At that stage the song was a backing track in search of a lyric and a title, and nobody in the room could have known it would become the turning point of the group’s career.
The title came from Stig Anderson, the group’s manager, who was also an experienced lyricist with an exceptional knack for finding just the right title — an art that often looks simple only after someone has done it well. Anderson dreamed up “SOS,” three letters that worked in every language on earth, instantly understood, instantly dramatic. His first draft of English-language lyrics for the song, however, was almost completely rewritten by Björn, who shaped the words into the final lyric: a woman addressing a lover who has gone cold, asking where the love went, admitting she cannot live without it, sending out the oldest distress signal in the book. The result was unusual for ABBA in one important way. Where most of their earlier songs had been built around bright, shared choruses and a sense of fun, “SOS” opened with something stark and almost classical: an unaccompanied keyboard figure in a subdued D minor, followed by Agnetha singing alone, her voice sounding, as one account put it, almost as if she were breaking down in tears. Only then did the song explode into its rock chorus in a major key, all distorted guitar and full-throated harmony. The contrast between the lonely verse and the defiant chorus was the whole record in miniature: despair, then a shout for help.
There was, remarkably, a moment when the song almost did not get its chance. When the group and their advisers chose the first single from the new sessions, due in November 1974, they went with “So Long” instead of “SOS.” It was a costly misjudgment. “So Long” went on to become, in the official ABBA site’s words, the group’s worst-performing single internationally until their very last few singles eight years later. By early 1975, with the album sessions drawing to a close, the picture had changed. Four tracks had crystallised as having exceptionally strong potential: “Mamma Mia,” “I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do,” “Bang-A-Boomerang” and “SOS.” The group released “I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do” first, and it did well in some territories, but it was “SOS,” released as the third single from the album — in Scandinavia in June 1975, and in Britain only in September — that finally broke the dam.
The British chart story is worth telling in detail, because it shows a hit arriving the hard way. “SOS” entered the UK chart on September 6, 1975, at a tentative number 47 in a 50-position survey. A week later it climbed into the Top 40 at number 31. Then it rose to 16, paused at 13, climbed to 7, and finally reached its peak of number 6, where it stayed for two weeks. It was ABBA’s return to the British Top 10 for the first time since “Waterloo,” and as Björn later put it, “The strongest memory I have of ‘SOS’ is that it was the song that brought us back in England.” That return was not a one-off. “SOS” kicked off a run of 18 consecutive Top 10 hits in Britain, a streak that would carry the group through the rest of the decade. In Ireland it went even higher, reaching number 4, and it topped the charts in Australia, Belgium, France, West Germany — where it spent seven weeks at number one — New Zealand and South Africa, while reaching the Top 3 in Austria, the Netherlands, Norway, Italy (where it became ABBA’s most successful hit), Mexico, Rhodesia and Switzerland. In America it became the group’s second Top 20 hit, peaking at number 15 on the Billboard Hot 100, helped by heavy airplay from stations like Chicago’s WLS, which ranked it the 61st biggest hit of 1975.
The song also won over the people ABBA most needed to impress: other musicians. The Who’s Pete Townshend reportedly approached Björn to tell him that “SOS” was the best pop song ever written, a compliment the official ABBA site has recorded with evident pride. John Lennon, too, was said to be an admirer. It is easy to see why serious songwriters responded to the record. Beneath the glittering production, “SOS” is built with real craft: the descending chords of the introduction, the ominous Minimoog synthesiser line, the way Agnetha’s solo vocal gives way to the full group’s harmony, the way the song’s structure mirrors its subject — a person alone, then a person shouting for help, then a person surrounded by voices. Björn himself has said that after three years of trying to figure out what style would define them, ABBA found its identity as a pop group with “SOS.” It was the moment the group stopped chasing a sound and discovered the one they already had: melancholy dressed up as pop perfection, sadness you could dance to.
The song’s visual life helped it travel, too. The promotional video, directed by the young filmmaker Lasse Hallström, was one of the first pioneering music videos the group ever made, filmed largely from an overhead camera, as if from a tower or lighthouse, watching the four band members below. It was shot over two days alongside the videos for “Mamma Mia,” “I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do” and “Bang-A-Boomerang,” for a total cost of just 50,000 Swedish krona — a bargain that bought the group a whole new way of reaching audiences. ABBA performed “SOS” on American Bandstand on November 15, 1975, during their first visit to the United States, bringing the song to the American teenagers who would make it a Top 20 hit. And the song had a second life in Swedish as well: Agnetha recorded her own Swedish-language version for her fifth solo album, Elva kvinnor i ett hus (Eleven Women in One House), released in late 1975, and even without promoting it, that version reached number 4 in Sweden during a 20-week chart run.
There is a piece of pop trivia attached to “SOS” that has become part of its legend, and it is worth pausing on because it captures the song’s strange perfection. “SOS” is a palindrome — it reads the same forwards and backwards — and so is “ABBA.” The single is therefore the only hit in history, at least in the Hot 100 and Australian number-one record books, in which both the artist’s name and the song’s title are palindromes. It is a fitting accident for a song about a love going in circles, a distress call that ends where it began. The palindrome did not make the song a hit, but it gave the world one more reason to remember it, and it has been repeated in almost every account of the record ever since.
The song’s afterlife has been longer and stranger than almost any other ABBA hit, because other musicians kept finding themselves in it. The Sex Pistols’ Glen Matlock later said that the riff of “Pretty Vacant,” the band’s 1977 anthem, was inspired by something he heard on an ABBA record — “SOS” — a claim that sounds like a joke until you hear the two songs side by side and realise how much punk owed to pop’s craftsmanship. Portishead covered “SOS” in a slow, haunted arrangement that stripped away the glitter and left only the distress call, proving that the song’s sadness was real underneath the polish. Cher recorded it as the second single from her 2018 album Dancing Queen, a tribute to the group that had made the song, and her version’s video was styled as a deliberate homage to the original. In 2012, Paste magazine ranked “SOS” at number 21 on its list of the 100 greatest songs of the 1970s, writing that there is “a startling intensity to this song,” and that “Benny and Björn wrote the pop playbook, and ‘SOS’ is the first entry.”
There is a final irony worth savouring, and it belongs to the song’s title. A distress call is supposed to be a last resort, sent when all else has failed. ABBA sent theirs at the moment their career was closest to failing, and the world answered. Without “SOS,” there is no “Mamma Mia” as a global phenomenon, no “Dancing Queen,” no decade of dominance, no Mamma Mia! musical, no Voyage hologram show half a century later. The group that sang about needing someone to save them was saved, in the end, by the song itself. That is why “SOS” still stops listeners in their tracks, fifty years on. It is not just a great pop record. It is the sound of a band discovering, in three letters and a minor-key piano figure, exactly who they were — and of four people who had almost been written off, writing the song that made them impossible to ignore.
Watch the video below and listen for the moment the lonely piano gives way to the full chorus. It is the sound of a distress call being answered, by the whole world at once.