For connoisseurs of perfect pop, Annie’s much-delayed second album was anticipated with such fevered emotion that over 200 pages had been created on the Popjustice.com forum before it finally saw the light of day. Thankfully, no-one was disappointed, with producers Xenomania, Paul Epworth and Richard X combining to create one of the best pop albums in recent years. In amongst the playground chants (‘Hey Annie’), stuttering electro (‘I Don’t Like Your Band’) and sophisticated synth ballads (‘Marie Cherie’), Annie’s glacial vocals and unique delivery helped make each song at least twenty times more memorable than most other chart music, which, given the fact this inexplicably failed to chart, is all the more amazing. In it’s original incarnation, the brilliant fuzz-pop of ‘My Love Is Better’ featured a certain Girls Aloud on the chorus, but record company wrangles meant they were removed. This is probably not that significant, but for the sake of symbolism we’ll assume it was because they couldn’t handle the fact that the quirky pop mantle had been passed on to someone else. Girls Aloud are dead, long live Annie.
Key track: ‘I Don’t Like Your Band’
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