It’s been a while since Anne Lilia Berge Strand became every indie boy’s favorite Scandinavian pop star—a classification growing less exclusive every day—and a while since Annie’s debut LP Anniemal was finally released, to a little less fanfare than one might have expected. Anniemal may have suffered from a kind of overexposure peculiar to the Internet age: “Heartbeat,” its impeccably graceful core, had been tripping ethereally from Soulseek user to Soulseek user since mid-2004, and those Annie fans of the greatest rabidity or fewest scruples had been listening to the entire album since… whenever it was I downloaded it.

Since Anniemal’s release, the Annie track to receive the most press has been “Wedding,” one of two new tracks on last year’s DJ Kicks mix: stuttering and almost overstuffed, it’s Annie’s most overtly seductive song, and perhaps because of this not quite her most genuinely seductive one; at any rate, its darker, denser synths hinted at a new if not radically different direction for the singer. The recently released advance single from Annie’s sophomore album confirms the “new” hypothesis but comes a lot closer than expected to “radically different”—”The Crush” is loud, guitar-drenched, sounds nothing like “Wedding,” and, more importantly, sounds nothing like “Heartbeat.”

For these reasons and more, it takes a while to warm up to. But listen to “The Crush” enough and the clean-whitewater guitars turn from monotonous to irresistibly propulsive; the single-syllable falsetto in the chorus becomes something you can’t help waiting for; and Annie’s new habit of ricocheting between her normal voice and an out-of-range Karen O squeal becomes minorly fantastic. The track’s influences aren’t hard to pinpoint—Google “annie the crush” and you’ll get maybe six more hits than “annie the crush go-gos”—but that’s because it’s a pop song, two minutes long, crunchy on the outside and sweet on the inside, with lyrics as original as a Blondie strip and music as experimental as Scholasticism. It may seem as if there’s too much of this around—the pop revolution Annie may or may not have spearheaded has alarming numbers of critics using phrases like “strict formalism” to describe the Pipettes—but really there’s not enough of it, not enough deft, fun, real pop songs that sound like they just happened rather than got carefully assembled by people with “Back To Mono” pins and a solemn reverence for ABBA. Pins and ABBA are probably exactly what you need to make a song like this, but you also need to be invisible, and for all “The Crush”’s influence-mining and anachronistic crunch, it still sounds like a girl walking down the street chewing bubblegum and singing, while the guitars chug and nobody thinks to wonder where they’re chugging from. Not a strict formalist in sight.

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