Coming Attraction: Bonnie McKee

There may be budding pop stars more flirty, bratty, world-weary and dangerous than 18-year-old Bonnie McKee. If so, Blender can’t wait to meet them! Part ultradepressed poetry girl, part Lolita and self-described “attention whore,” McKee has one of the most provocative new records of the fall, and the personality to match.

“When I was 8 years old, my mother would say, ‘You’re such a sexpot,’ ” recalls the former Seattle raver. “I was always putting on lipstick and lying on top of my grandmother’s piano in sunglasses. I wanted to be a bad girl so much.”

Written entirely by McKee and heavily influenced by one of her heroes, the delightfully unhinged Fiona Apple, Trouble is confessional dance-pop at its most slick and sultry. The album mostly documents the fourteenth and fifteenth years of her turbulent life, when she got kicked out of high school, developed a nasty meth habit (she has since cleaned up) and, if her lyrics are any indication, had a fair amount of sex.

Trouble’s most eyebrow-raising moment comes in “January,” a song in which McKee feverishly awaits the day she reaches the age of legal consent.

“It’s about the 30-year old boyfriend I had when I was 14,” McKee explains matter-of-factly. “There’s a lot of that in the rave scene: men who have Peter Pan syndrome and little girls who want to grow up fast.”

McKee’s relationships with men have become no less complicated and only moderately less illicit. Shortly after her eighteenth birthday, she married her longtime Seattle boyfriend; though still hitched, she has started seeing someone else, a clean-cut guy who lives down the hall from her in Los Angeles. She doesn’t recommend this sort of thing.

“Cheating is bad,” she says. “That’s a big mistake that I’ve made, and I’ve really hurt people. I’ve never lied about it, though. I’ve always been honest.”

McKee’s relentless truth-telling, especially regarding her sexuality, is Trouble’s chief asset. It is also giving her label headaches. “They’re like, ‘It’s a little too sexual,’ ” McKee says. “I’m like, ‘Do you know how much money this is going to make you?’ It’s not like it’s something I’ve contrived. It’s just the way I am.”