Glitter, Guzheng, and Björn: Meet the Asian Artists Rewiring ABBA's DNA Into Something Completely New

A new wave of producers and musicians across Japan, China, and Southeast Asia isn't just listening to ABBA — they're pulling the songs apart stitch by stitch and rebuilding them into something that sounds like the future. We talked to several of these artists about what it means to find your creative voice inside someone else's chorus.

The Unlikely Starting Point

Kaito Murakami didn't grow up with ABBA. The 26-year-old producer from Osaka stumbled onto "Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!" through a TikTok edit that had been chopped, screwed, and layered under footage of neon-lit convenience stores at 3 a.m. He spent the next two weeks listening to nothing else.

"I kept asking myself — what is it?" he says, leaning back in his home studio, walls plastered with synthesizer diagrams and a faded poster of Ryuichi Sakamoto. "The chord change in the verse. It shouldn't feel that urgent. But it does. Every time."

Kaito has since built an entire EP around what he calls "borrowed urgency" — original J-pop compositions that use ABBA's structural tension as a template while layering in traditional Japanese instrumentation, lo-fi textures, and lyrics drawn from contemporary Tokyo life. The result sounds nothing like ABBA and everything like ABBA at the same time. It's a neat trick, and it's catching attention.

The Songwriting Blueprint That Travels

What is it about ABBA that keeps drawing in artists from musical traditions so far removed from 1970s Stockholm? Ask enough producers and a few consistent answers emerge: the vocal counterpoint, the way major and minor chords coexist in the same song without fighting each other, and what several artists independently described as "emotional efficiency" — the ability to deliver a complete feeling in under four minutes.

Yuying Chen, a C-pop producer based in Chengdu who releases music under the name 晴雨 (roughly translating to "Sunny Rain"), has been openly sampling ABBA's harmonic structures for the past three years. Her track "两个太阳" ("Two Suns") is built on a chord progression that directly mirrors the verse of "The Winner Takes It All," but wrapped in erhu strings, trap hi-hats, and a vocal melody that draws from Sichuan folk scales.

"ABBA understood that sadness and happiness aren't opposites," Yuying says over a crackling video call from her studio. "They exist in the same breath. That is very Chinese, actually. We have a phrase — 悲喜交加 — it means grief and joy arriving together. ABBA songs feel like that."

Her music has amassed a devoted following among Chinese college students, many of whom discovered the ABBA originals after hearing her work — a reversal of the typical influence pipeline that she finds deeply satisfying.

Southeast Asian Producers Are Doing Something Different

In Thailand and Vietnam, a younger cohort of producers is approaching ABBA less as a harmonic blueprint and more as a production philosophy. The emphasis here is on density — the way Benny Andersson layered keyboards, strings, and backing vocals to create a sound that felt enormous without feeling cluttered.

Nam Nguyen, a 23-year-old producer from Ho Chi Minh City who creates hyperpop-adjacent electronic music, describes his ABBA obsession in almost technical terms. "The reverb on those records is insane when you study it closely," he says, grinning. "Everything sounds like it's in a cathedral, but nothing bleeds into anything else. I've been trying to figure out how they did that for two years."

Nam's productions incorporate đàn tranh — a traditional Vietnamese zither — processed through vintage-style reverb chains that deliberately evoke the ABBA studio sound. The combination is genuinely striking: ancient string tones floating through a sonic space that feels borrowed from a Swedish recording session circa 1977.

"It's not nostalgia for me," he's quick to clarify. "I never lived in that era. It's more like — I found a tool that works. Why wouldn't I use it?"

The Question of Cultural Ownership

Not everyone in these artists' circles is entirely comfortable with the ABBA influence. Some critics within Asian music communities have questioned whether leaning into a Swedish pop template — however transformed — represents a kind of cultural deference to Western pop history.

Kaito pushes back on that framing firmly. "Björn and Benny were pulling from American pop, from classical music, from folk traditions that weren't theirs either," he says. "Music has always worked this way. You take what moves you and you make it yours. That's not deference. That's how culture actually moves."

Yuying agrees, though she frames it differently. "When I use ABBA's harmony, I'm not saying 'Western music is better.' I'm saying 'this specific tool does something I need.' I use Chinese folk scales for the same reason. The music doesn't know where it came from."

Building Bridges, One Sample at a Time

For US listeners discovering these artists — often through the same streaming algorithms that have been quietly pushing ABBA into Asian markets — the experience can feel genuinely disorienting in the best possible way. You recognize something without being able to name it. You feel the ABBA DNA without hearing ABBA. And then, if you follow the thread, you end up somewhere entirely new.

That's the bridge these artists are building. Not a nostalgic monument to four Swedes in platform boots, but a living, evolving conversation between a songwriting legacy and a generation of creators who found it on their own terms, through their own routes, and decided it was worth something.

At Asia ABBA Fan Hub, we'd say that's exactly how a musical legacy is supposed to work. The song doesn't end when the record stops. It just waits for the next person to pick it up and see what it can do.

And right now, some of the most interesting people picking it up are doing so from studios in Osaka, Chengdu, and Ho Chi Minh City — and the results are worth every minute of your listening time.