"I like you so much better when you're naked/I like me so much better when you're naked" Like the Norse warrior maiden Freya, 24-year-old Norwegian rocker Ida (eee-da) Maria is a force of nature, a goddess of love, fertility and sexual desire who led the Valkyries into battle, a fearless fighter who, paradoxically, has a passion for romantic music and flowers. Mirroring the weather in the tiny university town of Nesna in Norway, where she grew up, Ida Maria is a raging storm one moment, a blinding ray of sunshine the next.

That dichotomy is perfectly captured on Fortress Round My Heart, her debut album for Mercury Records, and a description of the armor she takes into war-the songs which form her defense against the world, but also reveal the raw, honest emotions that she put into creating them. It forms the kind of full-bodied attack Ida and her powerful Swedish band-guitarist Stefan Tornby, bassist Johannes Lindberg and drummer Olle Lundin-exhibit on the U.K. hit single, "I Like You So Much Better When You're Naked," which catapulted the critically acclaimed Fortress straight into the British Top 40, prompting comparisons to female vocal sirens like Janis Joplin, Nico and Chrissie Hynde.

"I hoped that song was going to be for the alternative kids while I wrote it," she says of "Naked." . I wanted to see how catchy I could make all the songs. I hadn't really grown up on anything but rock music, so I tried to see if I could do that." About the song's unusual lyric, Ida says: "It's very much a shout-out to all those who objectify women. I wanted to turn it around and make the male body an object. I think I succeeded and I'm very happy about this." The tune uses as its indelible hook a sing-song nursery rhyme that sounds like a "Shortnin' Bread"-style standard you've heard before, but can't quite place. "I used the simplest kind of melody to get my message across, so that people would sing the words out loud, and then maybe discover the message later."

The rambunctious "Oh My God," the album's second single, received a four-star review on Rolling Stone.com, landed at #3 on Time's "Top Ten List of Everything in 2008" and was used in on-air promos for the current season of Gossip Girl. Ida Maria says the song, in which she rails, "Find a cure/a cure for my life...Put a price/a price on my soul," is about "talking to myself, trying to figure out what this is all about. It was originally a very slow, soft ballad, that just became more and more angry, like a panic attack."

"Morning Light," which she describes as "an answer song to Bright Eyes' Conor Oberst," has the dance-punk rhythms of Franz Ferdinand crossed with the elemental power of the Velvet Underground's "Rock and Roll," accompanying universal sentiments like "What's easy in the night/Is always such a bite in the morning light."

"Stella" imagines God offering "the best of drugs" and "the world" to seduce a 43-year-old hooker, a song Ida Maria explains is based on a real-life woman from Copenhagen, "who was very strong, fascinating, colorful and beautiful, a painter," which ends with a gut-wrenching, Joplinesque yelp from the back of her throat and depths of her being.

It's all part of Ida Maria's discovery of "the inner beast that was hiding in my vocal chords," the incredible yowl that turns order into chaos, then picks up the pieces and attempts to put them together again.

"I've always been a very quiet person, until I discovered alcohol," says Ida, whose own musical background began with her dad, a bassist "very much into black music, soul, funk and jazz," placing her in front of the home stereo speakers as he put on albums by Miles Davis and John Coltrane. "When I started playing with this band, we rehearsed in the basement of this church with the worst equipment. I was afraid no one would hear me, so I had to scream," she recalls. "Of course, when we started playing gigs, I had stage monitors, but by then it was too late because I'd already been singing like that."

After learning to play the guitar at 14, she left her small hometown, moving to the other side of Norway to Bergen, an eclectic community with burgeoning local musical scenes in jazz, metal, electronica and bluegrass, known for bands like Royskopp and Kings of Convenience, where she proceeded to soak up those influences like a sponge.

"When I first picked up the guitar, I found a new world," she explains. "I just played around with it, made up my own chords and wrote