Orphaned by her label after a year of delays, indie-pop queen Annie has pushed her sophomore album Don’t Stop into being with the persistence of her will and some clever marketing. But her talent for addictive hooks certainly isn’t hurting her.

Candy-sweet Norwegian singer Annie might not be human. Her songs are a little too good to be true, possibly more human than human. Listening to her is like that scene in Alien where the vicious title character explodes from its pod and implants itself in that space explorer’s face. Indeed, the melodies of Annie’s best tracks fuse themselves to your cranium while their glistening production sucks out your ability to resist.

“The sound of pop changes so quickly,” she says. “I always, with my music, try to write the kind of song that stays with you. It should be able to sound fresh years later based on the strength of its melody.” In other words, Annie writes Pop songs with a capital P, a tradition well established by fellow Swedes ABBA, Roxette, Max Martin, and Robyn. Among these peers—and numerous other one-named pop starlets—Annie holds her own, a fact she’s been dying to reiterate to the public at large for the past two years.

Don’t Stop, the just-released follow-up to her breakout 2005 debut Anniemal, should actually be on the tail end of its promotional campaign by now. Island Records UK originally slated it to drop last fall, then they got cold feet and pushed it back three months. A spunky video for the Richard X.-produced “I Know Ur Girlfriend Hates Me” hit the Web, but then Don’t Stop stalled for another three months. Then the album leaked—massively. “It was really, really annoying,” she says, looking back on the ordeal. “I was so excited about these songs and I just wanted them to get out there so they could live their lives.” When Annie finally decided she’d had enough and parted ways with Island in April of this year, she found herself unsigned with a brilliant product that any rube could track down for free. “It took me way too long to figure out this wasn’t going to work out at all.”

“Initially I sent some songs to [Island’s then-president] Nick Gatfield. He thought they were brilliant, and he was involved in a really positive way; I was talking to him at least once a week while I was recording. And then suddenly one morning I get this e-mail from him saying, ‘I’m leaving Island,’ and I’m like, ‘Uh-oh.’ Once the new president [Darcus Bees] was in place, it became a struggle very quickly. It went from totally great to them not getting it at all.”

Calling from her adopted home of Berlin, Annie (born Anne Lilia Berge-Strand) recalls Bees had no idea what he wanted. We point out that this is a horrible quality in a label president.

“I know! One day he’d be excited about a track, like, ‘Yes, this is going to be the big single.’ And then the next day his assistant would say, ‘I don’t know. I don’t think it’s that great.’ Suddenly, he’d change his mind. There was a lot of insecurity. I felt like I was working against a wall, like, ‘How am I ever supposed to do this?’”

Island’s inability to come up with a stable marketing plan is nothing short of ridiculous; Anniemal garnered rave reviews and sold 100,000 copies. Pitchfork named “Heartbeat” its song of the year. For Don’t Stop, Annie reunited with her debut’s producers (Richard X. and Timo Kaukolampi) and struck further gold with Xenomania (Girls Aloud), Paul Epworth (a.k.a. Phones), and Alex Kapranos of Franz Ferdinand. The album is by no means perfect, but its strengths are abundant, and stylistically it sprawls past the expected variations on electro toward punchy new strands of dance rock (“My Love Is Better” stands among her best), and torchy, Goldfrapp-esque ballads (“Marie Cherie” reads as an eerie love letter to a 15-year-old girl who killed herself, written by a schoolmate who lives down the road). “Heaven or Hell” closes the set with a blissful lullaby/lament about a dying relationship. It would rocket to Number One if the name on the radio promo disc read “Lily Allen.”

Which is to say that, despite the reams of favorable press, Annie has yet to achieve the level of airplay she thinks she’s capable of. So she’s getting creative. Her hands-on marketing for “Anthonio,” her recent single, included giving interviews in which she claimed Anthonio was real and she was trying to find him. (In the song, he’s a lover who has mysteriously abandoned her). Within weeks, an answer song called “Annie,” popped up, sung by “Anthonio.” (It’s clearly the Italo-duo Heartbreak.) They had planned it. Who else conjures surprises like this in 2009? To maximize the freshness of the campaign, she partnered with Smalltown Supersound and boldly scrapped “Anthonio” and “I Know Ur Girlfriend Hates Me” from the track list to make room for four new songs. “I had a lot of time off,” she explains. “So I kept writing and recording songs. I wanted a new beginning to make it exciting again.”

Ultimately, Annie injects enough wit, sarcasm, and twisted humor into her feather-light vocals to endear Don’t Stop to disco-phobes who normally only listen to dance music ironically. Not that she’s specifically courting them. Nope, Annie wants everybody’s attention. Consider what she’s been through and look at the title of her album, and you can tell that she believes she deserves it. “I can do everything!” she exclaims with a laugh. “But mostly I just have a good ear.”

Words: Christian W. Smith
Image: Nina Merikallio

as featured in Issue 30