ABBA – Tiger

ABBA never put “Tiger” out as one of Arrival’s singles, then opened every concert of their 1977 tour with it.

The setlist for ABBA’s 1977 tour of Europe and Australia had Tiger at the top. Every night, before Waterloo, before SOS, and long before Dancing Queen came back as the encore, the group walked on to an album track that had never been one of Arrival‘s singles, with the sound of helicopters booming through the speakers first. It was the most menacing song on their brightest album, and they chose it as the first thing an arena heard.

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Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus wrote it in the middle of the Arrival sessions at Metronome Studio in Stockholm, and by late July 1976 it was on tape, alongside Dum Dum Diddle. Most of the album circles romance, money and the dance floor. This lyric hands the microphone to the danger instead: the narrator is a predator prowling the city after dark, warning anyone foolish enough to walk alone. Agnetha Fältskog and Anni-Frid Lyngstad share the lead vocal, so the threat arrives in two voices at once.

Polar released Arrival on October 11, 1976, with Dancing Queen already out ahead of it and Money, Money, Money and Knowing Me, Knowing You still to come. Tiger sat ninth of ten, the last song with a vocal before the closing instrumental. Recognition came slowly and from critics rather than charts. Reviewing the album for Pitchfork in 2016, Simon Goddard called it “a fabulously unsettling psycho-pop thriller of urban dystopia,” and The Guardian’s Alexis Petridis singled it out as gripping.

The song they walked on to

Before the tour, the song got pictures. Swedish broadcaster SVT made ABBA-dabba-dooo!! in September 1976, a special narrated by Per Falkman that set interviews with the four members and manager Stig Anderson between performances of eight songs from the new album. SVT2 first broadcast it on November 5, 1976. Tiger had its own clip in the program, with all four members dressed in denim and riding through the night in a Chevy, and that footage, later issued on the 2006 Arrival Deluxe Edition, is the clip ABBA’s official channel premiered on October 23, 2026.

Then came the stage. When ABBA set out in January 1977, Tiger opened the show, and the Australian leg brought it into ABBA: The Movie. For a group still known to many as the Eurovision act behind Waterloo, opening with this was a choice about who they wanted to be in front of a crowd. The helicopters, the dark and two voices singing as the thing in the shadows made the first minutes of an ABBA concert something closer to a thriller than a pop revue.

The song has outlasted its lack of a chart run. Listeners still argue over what the tiger stands for, and in 2025 Bryan Fuller used it over the final scene and into the end credits of his film Dust Bunny, a placement that leans on the menace rather than the melody.

ABBA’s reputation runs on sunshine, and Arrival is the record that cemented it. Tiger is the counterweight hiding near the end of that record, and the 1977 setlist shows the band knew exactly what they had. They could have opened with a hit. They opened with the song that frightens.