I was there, at the Bloc Party show at the El Rey Theater in Los Angeles, when Steve Aoki spun Annie’s “Chewing Gum” during a DJ set and looked like he was having the most fun in the room. That sentence might not make any sense to anyone born after Beyonce left Destiny’s Child, and for anyone who only knows Aoki as the cake-throwing superstar EDM DJ rather than the label head who released early records from ’00s indie and punk artists such as Pretty Girls Make Graves, The Kills, Gossip and, yes, Bloc Party. It’s incidentally the same label he still runs, Dim Mak, whose roster just sounds a lot different now, even if the American Apparel-style picture of him on the homepage nods to a bygone era.
But in 2005 I had slightly more in common with Aoki than I do with the one doing Vegas residencies, and I definitely know what it’s like to be mostly entertaining yourself at a paid gig. Maybe it’s just the nature of standing around between sets at a show, talking to friends, waiting for the lights to dim and for the headliner to walk onstage rather than pay attention to whatever the DJ is spinning, but that Annie banger hadn’t quite yet caught on with the crowd yet. I’ve been there before, having done my share of DJ gigs where I’d spin real-heads-know vinyl by Dinosaur or Lizzie Mercier Descloux only to have absolutely nobody pay attention. But it didn’t really matter—I enjoyed it.
But if anyone was paying attention, they would have caught a genuinely joyful and fun moment in 21st century pop, an infectious confection of rubbery synthesizers and hooks that never let up. In its bright burst of dancefloor energy, “Chewing Gum,” the first single from debut album Anniemal, helped introduce Anne Lilia Berge Strand to a worldwide audience (some parts of the world more than others) via big hooks and a heaping amount of understated sass, only a hint of attitude in her breathy, restrained vocals. Its chorus refrain of “you think you’re chocolate but you’re chewing gum” is, certainly, a pretty sick diss, but there’s a winking sort of irony in using it as a metaphor in a pop song this catchy. After all, the flavor’s still there after 22 years.
Annie didn’t debut with “Chewing Gum,” however; she released her first single, “Greatest Hit,” five years earlier in 1999, produced by her partner Tore Andreas Kroknes and built around a sample of Madonna’s “Everybody.” It took off quickly in her home country of Norway as well as in the UK, its limited edition of 500 7-inch singles selling out in just two days. “Greatest Hit” wasn’t intended to be an actual hit, but it was clear that Annie and Tore were on to something, and the next year started work on an album together.
They didn’t make it that far before their plans became sidelined. Born with a degenerative heart condition, Kroknes spent much of the year in a hospital bed, and in April 2001, died at age 23. The loss left Annie devastated, and by her own account, she barely left the house for the rest of the year, left questioning whether she could make music without her partner, the one with whom she’d made so many plans.
But as she emerged from her grief, Annie moved quickly. She ran a pop night in Bergen, DJed in Helsinki, and by spring of 2003 signed with 679 Records in the UK, which released her debut album Anniemal in 2004, featuring both “Chewing Gum,” highlighted as an NME single of the week, and its follow-up single “Heartbeat,” which was named Pitchfork’s single of the year.
***
I was there, on the rooftop of The Standard in Downtown L.A., when Annie performed songs from Anniemal next to hedonistic poolside partygoers while a guy who looked like someone’s shady uncle passed around free Jell-O shots. That Standard—as well as the models hired to pose in fishtanks as mermaids—isn’t there anymore, but they’ve since expanded to Ibiza and Bangkok.
This, after all, was the peak era of “indie sleaze.” Only nobody called it that back then—not that there wasn’t any sleaze, mind you, but because if you were actually going to parties photographed by the Cobrasnake you wouldn’t have been sober enough to establish a taxonomy.
I kept my own personal sleaze to a minimum—I still showed up to work on time(-ish) the next morning, but I loved the music more than anything. And driving this musical moment as much as the fashion or chemicals was a then-novel iPod-era merger of underground aesthetics with poptimist sensibilities. In 2005, listening to both mainstream pop and scuzzy indie rock wasn’t a world-ending paradox, and many of the most interesting artists at the time managed to exist in a space where pop flash and underground sensibilities could coexist, whether in the form of DFA nu-disco production, Goldfrapp’s irony-laced electro-glam, Ladytron’s 21st century update of synth-pop, or whatever it was that Fischerspooner was doing.
Anniemal, arriving first in the UK in the fall of 2004 before seeing a U.S. release the following spring, isn’t mentioned as often in this retroactive hodgepodge canon—maybe because it’s been out of print for a long time, maybe because its sleaze factor is decidedly lower than Peaches’ backup dancers wearing merkins (which are still part of the ensemble). Though a rooftop performance swarming with industry figures and questionably jiggly booze certainly felt pretty sleazy at the time. Nonetheless, few indie-dance albums of the era provided the kind of ecstatic thrill that Annie’s debut did.
That’s in part due to the production, which Annie shared with a rotating cast that included Röyksopp, Finnish producer Timo Kaukolampi, and 21st century pop producer extraordinaire, Richard X (Sugababes, Sophie Ellis-Bextor). The latter only worked on a handful of songs, “Chewing Gum” being one of them—which was also co-written by Hannah Robinson, who also co-wrote Rachel Stevens’ similarly bouncy, slyly bawdy “Some Girls.” X’s other major production on the album is “Me Plus One,” which wasn’t even a single curiously enough, but it’s arguably as much of a banger as “Chewing Gum,” juxtaposing a Bananarama-circa-1984 new wave gloss with Annie offering both spelling and math lessons along with a promise that “if ever was a girl that could rock your world, then that girl sure is me.” It also features some barking dog samples that deserve merit as one of the best uses of a synthetic animal sound since New Order enlisted the sound of frogs in “Perfect Kiss”.
Single-of-the-year honoree “Heartbeat,” produced by Röyksopp, is a gloriously soaring dream-disco anthem that’s as good as the hipster cognoscenti of the mid-oughts would have told you it was. It’s masterpiece of dance music, funky guitar scratch and a thumping snare against ascendant synths, a stunning piece of electronica with the physical urgency of a live band.
I could keep going with the highlights: the sinister and slinky “Happy Without You,” the most Kylie-esque of the bunch with the deepest bass; the throbbing-bass and pizzicato strings of “Always Too Late,” more Timbaland than Ed Banger; and the title track, its hypnotic arpeggios wrapped around pitch-shifted “da-da-das.” And of course, “Greatest Hit,” the song that introduced Annie, which she almost cut from the tracklist, ultimately deciding that it didn’t sound as if it has aged. It’s 20-plus years later, and still hasn’t.
Annie’s UK label 679 didn’t quite know how to market the album, given it was a mainstream-pop-curious record in an indie world, though it achieved modest success, selling over 100,000 copies worldwide and cracking the top 20 on Billboard’s Top Electronic Albums chart. Since then, Annie’s released two more full-length albums: 2009’s similarly excellent Don’t Stop (featuring production from Bloc Party collaborator Paul Epworth, fittingly enough) and the more melancholy pandemic-era release, Dark Hearts. She’s issued a handful of EPs and various singles, collaborated with Alan Braxe and Fred Falk and even served as a guest judge on Idol Norway, a Scandinavian counterpart to American Idol.
But perhaps the greater legacy of Anniemal is its pioneering position in bridging pop with the underground. Her debut beat Robyn‘s self-titled, career-defining comeback by a little under a year, and its sound seemed to predict the rise of a new generation of electro divas like Little Boots and Marina and the Diamonds, not to mention its ripples through the pulse of Carly Rae Jepsen’s own masterpiece a decade later.
***
I was there, at a dancepunk/electroclash night at a local hangout in Richmond where I heard at least 10 bands I saw live in my twenties, some of them multiple times. Because while, no, I’m not nostalgic for those times—being less broke and less naive goes a long way, even if there’s a part of me that still wouldn’t mind looking twenty-five and not being so tired all the time—I still can’t help but have a surplus of affection for the music of the era. For the most part.
I didn’t hear “Chewing Gum,” regrettably, or “Heartbeat,” or “Greatest Hit,” or any of the other certified bangers from Anniemal. Maybe on another night it’d be different, or maybe my hypothesis that it wasn’t sleazy enough proved correct. But if the DJ were to queue up “Chewing Gum” the next time I’m there, I can guarantee I’ll be having more fun than anyone else in the room.
Treble is supported by its patrons. Become a member of our Patreon, get access to subscriber benefits, and help an independent media outlet continue delivering articles like these.
