The elusive prospect of an ABBA reunion, now finally realized, has always defied the usual logic of revivalism. Where most reforming legends bank on fans made hungry by their absence, ABBA are physically incapable of going away. In 1992, their singles collection Gold kickstarted a one-album nostalgia industry, selling millions and commanding a wholesale critical rethink that predated poptimism by a decade. Their songs are now so iconic that “pop” is too local a term. But ABBA in the modern era? It seems a categorical mistake, demystifying them as a group beyond taste and time.

Everybody knows how they feel about ABBA: You love it, you hate it, you tolerate it, you require it only sometimes and then demand it, you drink it like champagne (only at parties), or you breathe it in privately, like old perfume on left-behind clothing. But there is no doubt that you get it. Where taste is generally understood to help us form a cultural identity, the act of loving or hating ABBA signifies little, and comes so naturally that it barely counts as an opinion. At an irresponsibly young age, we make the call on whether or not we are ABBA people and so, one way or another, we take them for granted. In adulthood, the only way to reassess ABBA is by a kind of reinvention, to reckon with yourself in such a way that other previously held beliefs become suspect, too.

My first ABBA memory is seeing “Dancing Queen” induce euphoria at a golden wedding anniversary party, a conventionally tacky event that struck me then as the only right place for ABBA, whose music was otherwise unfeasible. It’s tempting to say that this flimsy sound, to my 6- or 7-year-old ears, was simply archaic, but that would be too kind. Like any child with a music-adoring parent, I was aware of an “old stuff” pantheon—the Doors, Bob Marley, the sound of long drives and lazy Sundays—and begrudgingly respected it. But those were curious antiques, whereas ABBA were practically dust, old curtains boxed up in the attic.

To attend the party, we’d driven out to a massive function hall in the suburbs of a small English city. It was the kind of evening where harried hosts direct you toward bounteous “nibbles,” where you must try the Greek dip, and where, once a child is nibbled out, there is little else to do but observe septuagenarians dance, and eventually sell mom on the idea of a swift escape. When “Dancing Queen” kicked in, my response was not active resistance but ambient distaste. Sounds like a classic, I thought, instantly forgetting it existed.

For years this was ABBA’s presumed domain: bunting-clad banquet halls bathed in multicolor disco beams, inhabited by tipsy strangers looking foolish. What was then my taste—if the term can be applied to a palate exclusively reserved for Robbie Williams—would broaden in the coming years, then grow niche and extremely precise, and later more forgiving, until finally, in my later teens, it would encompass not just cult classics and oddities but the Beatles and Beyoncé, too. In all of this exploration, ABBA remained pop non grata, wallpaper plastered over the museum walls.

It is mysterious even now, this unacknowledged dismissal of the Great Pop Band, but the explanation has something to do with cultural orthodoxy. When it comes to art, there’s what you don’t like and what you would never. The former is a product of taste, because it’s consciously chosen. When Spotify suggests a track based on your listening history, you measure it by the yardstick of whatever shares its DNA. But there is also the art you couldn’t like, the conversation killer—not even irredeemable, just beyond consideration—and that belongs to a different order of subjectivity.