Review: Annie’s Dark Hearts Dives Into the Past with Both Regret and Wonder

The album sounds like the soundtrack to an imaginary teen drama co-directed by John Hughes and David Lynch.

Annie, Dark Hearts
Photo: Hildegunn Wærness

Norwegian pop singer Annie’s Dark Hearts is, per the artist herself, “a soundtrack to a film that doesn’t exist.” Throughout the album, her first in over a decade, Annie paints nostalgic, richly detailed narratives filled with road trips, fairgrounds, and idealistic young love—all set to jangly, atmospheric soundscapes that feel like they were lifted from some imaginary teen drama co-directed by John Hughes and David Lynch.

Annie broke out in the mid aughts with cheeky, indelible dance-pop like “Chewing Gum” and “Heartbeat,” but Dark Hearts luxuriates in an unapologetically moodier palette. The closest the album gets to a dance-floor filler is “The Bomb,” whose anxious mantra of “S.O.S.” and samples from the 1988 apocalyptic thriller Miracle Mile are backed by a shuffling breakbeat and Angelo Badalamenti-style synth washes. “They’re dropping the bomb/So put a beat on,” Annie sings, resigned to a fate of partying until the end of days.

The rest of Dark Hearts is decidedly more wistful, as Annie reflects on lost loves, family cycles of dysfunction, and her hometown of Bergen, Norway. Film references abound throughout, including more of those cool, cinematic synths on “The Untold Story,” in which Annie’s ethereal but detached vocal evokes that of Lynch muse Julee Cruise, and David Cronenberg’s Crash, which serves as the basis for “American Cars.” The latter details the hazards of a directionless romance, suggesting what it might sound like if Lana Del Rey dropped her indie beat-poet shtick and leaned fully into synth-pop.

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Producer Stefan Storm outfits Annie’s bittersweet reveries with big, bellowing drums and textures derived from pitch-affected vocals. On “Mermaids Dreams,” Annie’s voice is bent and distorted, beckoning like a siren from beneath waves of reverb, and her recollections of fleeting physical ecstasy on “In Heaven” are accompanied by mournful, tentatively plucked guitars. The songs leap from genre to genre, sonically tied together by their connections to the past: “The Streets Where I Belong” suggests the small-town tributes of Springsteen as sung by an anonymous dream-pop chanteuse, while the poetic “Corridors of Time” and the deceptively jovial “It’s Finally Over” channel classic pop modes like doo-wop and ’50s girl groups.

Stripped of these thematic threads or Storm’s inventive studio tricks, Annie’s wisp of a voice can easily float away from the listener. “Forever ‘92” falls flat in its attempts to summon the spirit of the titular era, and the drifting, Sade-esque rhythm of “Stay Tomorrow” isn’t robust enough to anchor the song’s theme of “sailing away.” That’s partly why 2004’s Anniemal, with its innovative production and impeccably crafted hooks, remains such an enduring and satisfying pop debut. In these dystopian times, it’s easy to long for the infectious dance-pop of that album or Annie’s other past releases, but Dark Hearts opts for a different kind of escape. Ten years on from her last full-length album, the singer is reckoning with the present by diving headlong into her past with equal parts regret and wonder.

Score: 
 Label: Annie Melody  Release Date: October 16, 2020

Sal Cinquemani

Sal Cinquemani is the co-founder and co-editor of Slant Magazine. His writing has appeared in Rolling Stone, Billboard, The Village Voice, and others. He is also an award-winning screenwriter/director and festival programmer.

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