"Heartbeat" (Annie)

I honestly don't know a lot about the performer Annie, other than she's a Norwegian singer/songwriter/DJ, who lost her boyfriend and artistic collaborator to heart failure a few years before the release of her first album Anniemal (2004).
I only heard the track "Heartbeat" from Anniemal by way of a mix CD that a friend had compiled for my birthday a few years back.  He'd carefully chosen a good mix of mainstream stuff with some more obscure things--including "Heartbeat."
I instantly warmed to the song because it reminded me a bit of Blondie, circa 1980: a little pop-punk crunch, a little disco-fied thump, although with a sweeter-than-sugar vocal that was way more bubblegum than Debbie Harry ever got.  In fact, Annie kind of skirts that line of, if she were any breathier or sweeter, she just would be too saccharine.  But she keeps it anchored with New Wave-y heart-on-your-sleeve sincerity, catchy verses, and a killer refrain that's indebted as much to Giorgio Moroder as it is David Byrne or Ric Ocasek.
Sure, on the surface it's a bubbly dance track about meeting a stranger at a party and instantly falling head over heels.  But there's that little bit of Scandinavian melancholy in the delivery that reveals the artist pining for a lost soulmate.  Once I learned that she'd actually lost her partner to a heart defect, it became that much more poignant.