About a Studio: Polar Studios, Stockholm
Polar Studios was the Stockholm recording studio built by ABBA's Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson with their manager Stig Anderson. It opened on 18 May 1978 in a former cinema on Kungsholmen, and in its first two years it produced ABBA's Voulez-Vous, Led Zeppelin's In Through the Out Door and Genesis's Duke. It closed in 2004. This guide covers the building, the desk, the records made there and the people who made them, and it ends with the thing we think most writing about famous studios gets backwards.
The short version: the most famous object from Polar now sits in a museum, and the most famous ABBA song was recorded three years before that object arrived in Sweden.
Polar Studios at a glance
Address: Sankt Eriksgatan 58-60, Kungsholmen, Stockholm, in an early 1930s building known locally as Sportpalatset because it had housed a public bath and sports facilities.
The room: a disused cinema, converted into a studio. Construction started in 1977.
Opened: 18 May 1978.
Founders: Björn Ulvaeus, Benny Andersson and Stig Anderson, owner of the Polar Music label.
The desk: a 40-channel Harrison 32 Series console, delivered in January 1978 and described by Harrison as the first 32-bus inline desk. It now lives in ABBA The Museum in Stockholm.
Key records: ABBA's Voulez-Vous, Super Trouper and The Visitors, Led Zeppelin's In Through the Out Door, Genesis's Duke, Anni-Frid Lyngstad's Something's Going On.
Closed: the studio left its original home on 1 May 2004, after 26 years, when the building changed hands and the rent went up.
Why ABBA built their own studio
By 1977 ABBA were one of the biggest acts in the world, and they had made every hit so far in rented Stockholm rooms, mainly Metronome and Glen Studios. Building their own place meant no booking calendar, no clock running on someone else's invoice and a room set up exactly the way Benny and Björn worked, which was slowly and obsessively, one layer at a time.
They put it in a cinema, which is a big, high-ceilinged box and a good start for a studio, and built the control room around the new Harrison. The desk was a statement in itself. In 1978 a 32-bus inline console was the newest way to run a big multitrack session, and Polar had one of the first.
Voulez-Vous (1979) was the first ABBA album made mainly at Polar, with only part of the title track's backing recorded in Miami. The sessions ran from March 1978 to March 1979, and six months in, only two songs were finished. Björn and Agnetha's marriage was ending at the time, and the tension in the band slowed things far more than any piece of equipment could speed them up. Super Trouper (1980) and The Visitors (1981) followed. The Visitors was cut on the studio's new 3M digital machine between March and November 1981, which made it one of the first mainstream pop albums recorded and mixed digitally. The final ABBA singles, "The Day Before You Came" and "Under Attack", were recorded there in 1982.
The ABBA sound was made before Polar existed
Most people get this part wrong. "Dancing Queen" was not recorded at Polar. The backing track was cut in August 1975, according to ABBA's own history of the song, and the Arrival album was made at Metronome and Glen Studios between August 1975 and September 1976. "Waterloo", "SOS", "Mamma Mia", "Fernando", "Knowing Me, Knowing You" and "The Name of the Game" all predate the Harrison desk too.
What those records had in common was not a room. It was a person. Michael B. Tretow engineered ABBA's records at Metronome and Glen, and he moved to Polar in 1978, where he later became studio manager. The trick that people now call the ABBA sound was his. He described recording the drums, the bass, the piano, the guitars and the vocals twice, with the tape machine slightly detuned on one pass through varispeed, then pairing the two versions left and right. Played back at normal speed, the pairs differ a little in pitch and tone, and the whole band shimmers.
That approach needs a tape machine with a varispeed control and an engineer who knows what he is listening for. It does not need a particular room, and Tretow brought it with him from rented studios into Polar. Benny Andersson's own tribute to Tretow called him the one who made the records timeless, which is a songwriter crediting an engineer, not a desk.
Led Zeppelin at Polar: In Through the Out Door
In November and December 1978, Led Zeppelin spent three weeks at Polar making what became their last studio album, In Through the Out Door. It is the most unusual record in their catalogue, and the reason is who turned up.
By the band's own accounts, Jimmy Page and John Bonham were frequently absent from the sessions, struggling with heroin and alcohol respectively. John Paul Jones and Robert Plant were there, working. Jones described the band as having split into two camps, with him and Plant in the cleaner one. Jones is a co-writer on six of the seven songs, more than on any other Led Zeppelin album, and "South Bound Saurez" and "All My Love" are the only two original Zeppelin songs Page did not help write.
Jones had just bought a Yamaha GX-1, a huge polyphonic synthesiser, and it is all over the record. That, more than the Stockholm room, is why In Through the Out Door sounds the way it does: a keyboard player with a new instrument and the time to use it, while the guitarist was not around. The album was then mixed at Page's home studio in Plumpton, England. It went to number one in the United States in its second week.
Genesis at Polar: Duke
A year later Genesis came to Stockholm. Duke was recorded at Polar from mid-November to December 1979 and mixed at Maison Rouge in London, then released in 1980. It mixes group-written pieces with songs each member wrote alone, including two by Phil Collins, and it points towards the shorter songs the band would make next.
Collins came back to Polar to produce Anni-Frid Lyngstad's 1982 solo album Something's Going On. She made it in her own band's studio, with a producer from London, and to our ears it sounds closer to a Phil Collins record than an ABBA one. Again, the sound arrived with the person.
After ABBA: the later years
ABBA stopped recording together in 1982, but Polar kept working for another two decades. Later clients included Roxette, Rammstein and the Backstreet Boys.
It closed because of property, not music. The building was sold, the rent rose sharply, and in 2004 Polar left Sankt Eriksgatan. The Harrison desk survived and is now on display at ABBA The Museum in Stockholm. Harrison marked the 20th anniversary of the closure in 2024.
What made Polar records sound the way they did
Tretow's varispeed doubling on the ABBA records, an engineer's technique rather than a feature of the building.
Time. Owning the room meant ABBA could spend months on an album without watching a clock. Voulez-Vous took thirteen months and The Visitors eight.
New instruments and new habits arriving with visitors. Jones's GX-1 on In Through the Out Door, Collins as drummer on Duke and as producer on Something's Going On.
Finishing elsewhere. Both of the famous visiting records were mixed in England, in rooms their makers already knew.
Our take: you are choosing people, not a room
We run a studio, so we have a stake in rooms mattering, and they do. A good room with a sympathetic acoustic makes some decisions easier, and a bad one fights you all day. We have argued for the room as part of the sound many times on this blog, and we stand by it.
But look at what Polar actually tells you. The most famous ABBA song predates the building. The most famous piece of equipment in the building is now a museum exhibit. The Led Zeppelin album made there sounds the way it does because of which band members showed up and what one of them had just bought. The Genesis album made there was shaped by a band changing direction, not by the desk. Every one of those sounds would have come out of a different room slightly different, and still recognisable.
Studio history gets told through rooms and desks because rooms and desks are easy to photograph. Gear mythology is a substitute for listening, and famous studios are gear mythology at building scale. The honest version is less romantic. A studio is the people in it, the time they have, and the decisions they are willing to commit to. The room is the least portable of those, and the least important.
That matters when you choose where to record or who mixes your record. The question is not which console they have or what was recorded there in 1978. The question is whose ears you are hiring, what they think your kind of music should sound like, and whether they will protect what makes it yours. You cannot rent Tretow by booking the room he worked in.
Nordic studios, and why so few people write about them
Stockholm, Copenhagen and the rest of Scandinavia produced a disproportionate number of the rooms that shaped rock and pop records, and most of their history is written in Swedish or Danish or not at all. We have covered the Danish side in Puk Studios, where Depeche Mode mixed Music for the Masses, and Sweet Silence, where Metallica made Ride the Lightning. If you are thinking about making a record up here yourself, our guide to recording studios in Denmark and planning a destination recording in Scandinavia are the practical versions of this story.
Polar Studios FAQ
What albums were recorded at Polar Studios?
ABBA's Voulez-Vous, Super Trouper and The Visitors, Led Zeppelin's In Through the Out Door, Genesis's Duke and Anni-Frid Lyngstad's Something's Going On. Later clients included Roxette, Rammstein and the Backstreet Boys.
Was "Dancing Queen" recorded at Polar Studios?
No. "Dancing Queen" was recorded in 1975, and the Arrival album was made at Metronome and Glen Studios in Stockholm. Polar did not open until May 1978.
Where was Polar Studios located?
In a former cinema at Sankt Eriksgatan 58-60 on Kungsholmen in Stockholm, in a 1930s building known as Sportpalatset.
Is Polar Studios still open?
No. Polar left its original building on 1 May 2004 after 26 years. Its Harrison console is on display at ABBA The Museum in Stockholm.
Why did Led Zeppelin record at Polar Studios?
Led Zeppelin recorded In Through the Out Door at Polar over three weeks in November and December 1978, when it was one of the newest and best-equipped studios in Europe. The album was mixed afterwards at Jimmy Page's home studio in England.
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