One of the new year's most remarkable albums comes from a twenty-eight-year-old Londoner named Maya Arulpragasam, who records as M.I.A. It also comes, less literally, from the jungles of Sri Lanka, where M.I.A. spent the first nine years of her life, and from the global underground, where she primed her DIY instincts. Arular, M.I.A.'s debut, is a guerrilla-style mishmash of dance-hall beats and jarring sound effects over which she sing-raps in a Brit-inflected urban patois about the displaced poor, being held for ransom and "paranoid youth blazin' through the hood."

"I like taking people on," M.I.A. says. "I'm a third-world refugee terrorist or whatever."

Growing up in Sri Lanka as part of the country's Tamil minority, M.I.A. was surrounded by violence as civil war escalated between the Tamils and the ruling Sinhalese. She rarely saw her father, a member of the insurgent Tamil Tigers, and in 1986, she barely escaped to London with her mother and two siblings. "The two years before I came to England were a mess," M.I.A. says. "My school got burned down. Loads of people I knew were killed." (In December, Sri Lanka was devastated by the Asian tsunami.)

In London, she found refuge in the hip-hop and ragga scenes and eventually landed at Central St. Martin's College of Art and Design, where she studied film. A cousin fighting with the Tamils was killed the week M.I.A. graduated, and she returned to Sri Lanka to make a documentary about youth culture. "There was no youth culture," she says. "I took a Jay-Z CD and an Eminem CD, and I was like, 'This is rap music.' And they're like, 'What's music?'"

The songs on Arular started out as home experiments -- although M.I.A. had almost no experience making music, she got crucial encouragement from Elastica's Justine Frischmann. Initially, M.I.A. auditioned female vocalists to sing her compositions, but after finding that they all employed "this R&B Whitney Houston fucking voice," she grabbed the mike. "How I sing is like how a tone-deaf person would sing," says M.I.A. "But I was like, 'I'm just gonna keep writing songs.' I had to understand that it's all about just being brave with who you are."