The first thing that sticks out about Norwegian yowler Ida Maria Børli Sivertsen is her bottom lip—beneath it, she has wedged a soggy dip of Swedish smokeless tobacco. The second is less obvious, a neurological condition called synesthesia that causes her to see colors and shapes whenever she hears music. “It’s like falling in a big pot of LSD when you’re a toddler,” she says. And it means that a typical direction to her bandmates also sounds like this: “Play pink, play black; here it’s supposed to be these dots in the middle,” she says.
Sivertsen, 24, grew up in Nesna, Norway, (population 1,900) and left town as soon as she could. “If you farted, the town priest would tell the people in church,” she says. At 16, she moved to Uppsala, Sweden, and studied classical composition at college, but instead of penning choir pieces, she formed Ida Maria, dropped out and recorded “Oh My God” and “I Like You So Much Better When You’re Naked,” two deranged, sexy singles that made the band a Top 40 sensation in the U.K. in 2008.

Her bitter snarl gives the album a primitive punk feel, but Sivertsen balances her acidic voice with her crimson-lipped party-girl persona and polished pop-song structures. “You choose between life and death, light and dark,” she says, tobacco firmly in place. “And I choose everything that’s shiny, bright, sparkling, sunshine.”