Abba top charts with Voyage, their first album for 40 years

The winner takes it all when it comes to the weekly UK albums chart battle, and on Friday the spoils went to an "over the moon" Abba for a 10th time.

The Swedish band's long-awaited Voyage - their first album of new material for 40 years - shot straight to number one, earning them the biggest opening week of sales for any album in four years.

Its 204,000 first-week chart sales is the highest since Ed Sheeran's Divide.

Abba's last studio album, 1981's The Visitors, also topped the chart.

The former Eurovision winners have since hit number one with their greatest hits collections, The Singles and Gold.

"We are so happy that our fans seem to have enjoyed our new album as much as we enjoyed making it," they told the Official Charts Company.

"We are absolutely over the moon to have an album at the top of the charts again."

The album is also the fastest-selling LP released by a group in eight years, since One Direction's Midnight Memories. Aside from Abba, Sheeran and One Direction, only Adele's 25 has breached the 200,000 barrier for first-week sales in the past decade.

Voyage is also the fastest-selling vinyl release of the century, overtaking the Arctic Monkeys' Tranquillity Base Hotel & Casino from 2018.

Only The Beatles and Elvis have now spent longer at number one than Agnetha, Björn, Benny and Anni-Frid.

While it's clearly been a hit with music fans, the 10-track album Voyage divided opinion among critics.

"It's vintage Abba, on par with their classic 1970s run," declared Rolling Stone in a four-star review. But The Guardian's two-star write-up said it was a "disappointment" that languishes in "often bafflingly retrograde settings".

On Friday, Abba singer Anni-Frid Lyngstad told the BBC "don't be too sure" that their comeback album is their last, in her first interview about the reunion.

"I have learned to say never to say never," she told BBC Radio 2's Zoe Ball about the prospect of future projects.

Elsewhere on Friday, another returning star, Adele, secured a fourth consecutive week at the top of the singles chart with Easy on Me.

The ballad was the first track to be released from her hotly-anticipated fourth album, which will be released next Friday, 19 November.

Easy on Me held off strong competition from Sheeran, who kept second and third spots on the singles rundown with Shivers and Bad Habits respectively, while his latest album = (Equals) was knocked into second place on the album chart by Abba.

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