NORDIC TRACKS The potential dance pop hits on Annie's debut have personality.

Dance-pop need not be a dirty word with mass market–driven associations; it can be good, clean—even smart—fun. At least, that's the buzz about twenty-five-year-old Norwegian techno-pop singer Annie (Anne Lilia Berge Strand) whose debut album, Anniemal, dropped June 7. The taste-making website Pitchforkmedia.com sung the praises of her "Heartbeat" single, which started the blog and press bandwagon rolling. But don't go thinking Annie is just a hipper version of the manufactured pop pin-up. She's a different...well, Anniemal.

True, on the phone from her hotel in Rome, she finishes most sentences either with a giggle or an "ahhh, I don't know..." or "yeah, that was really, really fun." She's loving life, obviously. But she makes it clear that Anniemal didn't come easy. "I'm not really sure what I call my own music, but it wasn't very easy to make the album, if you see it that way," she says in an untraceable EU accent. "It took me about three or four years to make the whole album. It's quite a lot of hard work. When I think of bubblegum music, I see it as quite easy and planned somehow; my album was definitely not like that."

In her teens, Annie played in indie outfit Suitcase, but didn't hit her stride until 1999 with "The Greatest Hit," a Madonna-sampling dance single (included on Anniemal) recorded with collaborator and boyfriend Tore "Erot" Kroknes. "He was a big inspiration for me musically," she says. "He had a lot of background in house and techno while I listened to more weird pop and rock." The duo had an album deal, but Kroknes died of a congenital heart defect in 2001.

It's been reported, erroneously, that a distraught Annie took years to get back into music. In fact, she was recording demos just a few months after the tragedy. She worked shifts in a clothes store, deejayed, did some guest vocals but stole away to a friend's Bergen, Norway, studio at night to create. "It was complicated for a while," she says.

After scoring her record deal with 679 Recordings, it got more so as she hopscotched between studios in Bergen, London and Finland. Two songs, the infectious single "Chewing Gum" and "Me Plus One," were written and produced by British dance guru Richard X, several songs were done with buddies Royksopp in Bergen, and the bulk with Timo Kaukolampi of Op:l Bastards in Finland, where she also acquired her live band.

Anniemal was in danger of becoming overblown with so much studio time involved. "We had to strip the whole thing down and start all over again," she says. "There was suddenly too much happening."

The back-to-basics approach worked, apparently. Anniemal rises above the guilty-pleasure level in that its bleeping electronics and galloping disco basses serve the delectable pop tunes, which are as sly as they are intoxicating. Annie's easy on the ears, but not always giddy. "I really like songs that give me this sort of melancholic but happy feeling," she says, referring to the forlorn "My Best Friend."

Unlike Britney's high-gloss amplified sexuality, Annie's music has ties to the indie dance-pop of '60s obsessives St. Etienne, disco classics and even the insouciant chanteuse tradition exemplified by Jane Birkin. The housier, electro-disco tracks on Anniemal ("Anniemal" and "Helpless for Love") are jeans-and-tee versions of the microminis of Kylie Minogue.

Annie's no powder puff, it turns out. An accomplished DJ in her own right, in awe of the skilled mechanics of Derrick May, she selects the Tom Tom Club to get people on the dance floor, or quirky fave Felix Kubim to clear the room. She counts Sarah Cracknell of St. Etienne and the disco diva Taana Gardner among her favorite singers, listens to Donna Summer, Mu, old Madonna and disco productions of Larry Levan and Arthur Russell. Hipness? Check.

Exactly who is Annie's audience? That depends where you are. It's the preteen girls who recognize her in Bergen. Her full band just played in London at "Horsemeat, a very gay place packed with shirtless men." Elsewhere, it's a different story, Annie says. "When I went on the last tour, I was signing a lot of guys' bellies. When I went to Sweden, I was signing a lot of older men, over 40 and 50." And in Rome? "I ate my first Italian pizza. It was extremely good—pizza Margherita. It was so simple, but there was something about the flavor." In pizza and pop, easy does it.

Annie plays Sonotheque June 30.