Thanks to years of label drama and just the simple passage of time, it's easy to forget the various ways that Anne Lilia Berge Strand changed the way dorks on the internet listened to, and thought about, music. When Pitchfork named Annie's "Heartbeat" the #1 track of 2004, Scott Plagenhoef, then the site's editor in chief, placed it at the forefront of a "new wave of fluxpop," defining that term as "tracks with a pop sensibility and communicative, crossover potential that are nevertheless more often transferred via 0s and 1s than Hot 97s or Radio Ones." Annie had earned some level of actual pop stardom at home in Norway, but over here, she was a curiosity, and her brand of curiosity was suddenly a fascinating thing for critics like me. Thanks to MP3 spots like Fluxblog, a song like "Heartbeat" could catch certain American and British ears and go low-level viral, its slight dissonances suddenly feeling weirdly important. Annie might talk about Death From Above 1979 or whatever in interviews, but she had no overt indie influence in her music; it sounded like straight-up Euro-pop froth, and it still got over with people who'd subsisted on a steady diet of Modest Mouse in the years before. At the time, a friend sniffed that "Heartbeat" was no different from Britney Spears, but that wasn't right, either. It was a song, with no brash edge to it, about longing and loneliness, topics with (ahem) some currency for indie dorks, but that feeling was artfully rendered as frothy Euro-pop rather than guitars-plus-bleats. And the realization that a song like this could be transcendent led publications like Pitchfork to hire assholes like me (first track review: Lil Scrappy, "No Problems," August 2004) and to notice that maybe Britney also had some transcendent songs (like "Toxic," Pitchfork's #3 track of 2004). A song like "Heartbeat," besides being an on-its-own-merits great song, had a lot to do with creating the internet-indie universe that we currently occupy -- a world where I work for an ostensibly indie site like Stereogum and I've already posted two different Drake pieces this morning. Maybe you hate Annie for that. I'd understand. But she's still very, very good at making frothy Euro-pop music.