With her fresh new take on hip-hop, dancehall, UK garage and electro, 'Arular,' sets the stage for M.I.A.'s take over of the US.

Maya Arulpragasam, aka M.I.A. was raised in Sri Lanka at a time when her father was involved in military activity supporting the Tamils. The family (minus her father) eventually fled to London in the 80s and M.I.A. attended art school studying fine art, film and video. She learnt how to play off her different cultural personae against each other; layering rap iconography with the warfare pictures from her youth, Asian Britain with American new-wave film making style and a fashion sense with refugee outlooks. While following British band Elastica on their US tour video-documenting the event, she met electro-clash supremo Peaches, who introduced Maya to the Roland MC-505 sequencing machine. Soon her demo started changing hands and inital pressings of “Galang� sold out.

Titled in acknowledgment of her father's past, Arular is M.I.A.'s debut album and follows the philosophy of cutting and pasting different sounds. “Sunshowers,� picks up where "Galang" left off sharing the same insane electro-squelch and mangled beats. Arular pushes the envelope with its hold-no-barrel approach and a hyper-minimalist production that creates a hypnotic template for her to fire out her young-girl bravado. At the end, M.I.A. creates culture clashes that work with ‘a unique voice unafraid to mix big issues with cool sounds’ (Harpers & Queen).