Listen to Soko's hit track "I'll Kill Her" here

A very pretty girl with a very bad mouth and even naughtier mind, Soko is an uncompromising newly-nascent songstress out of Paris. She’s a MySpace phenomenon (nearly 500,000 hits and counting) who peppers her speech with expletives and insists she couldn’t care less whether or not she’s on the airwaves. But she is, big time. Just last month she had the number one song in rotation on radio Denmark. Not impressed? Try these facts on for size: she’s unsigned, has less than a handful of songs completed, has never promoted herself and started singing just six months ago. “I’ve never tried to ‘break’ myself, to be recognised,” she says in her très adorable French accent. “I just put myself on MySpace and people responded.”

Her voice has a raspy edge to it and is girlishly high-pitch, like Betty Boop out on the tiles after smoking way too many fags. That voice and her delivery – sweetly-spoken smoky phrases of verse – coupled with her biting lyrics is what’s made her such a phenomenon. No one expects the doe-eyed chanteuse, singing about losing her man to another woman, to cap the thought off with a chorus of blistering revenge. Quite simply, “I’ll kill her, I’ll kill her,” trips off her tongue, vitriol dusted with sugar. The music is disconcerting in comparison to such lyrics. She strums out acoustic lullabies lightly on guitar. The stripped-down accompaniment is highlighted with soft chimes, a tambourine and the occasional floaty harmony.

One of five children born to an Eastern European family living in Bordeaux, her real name is Stephanie Sokolinski, though she's been called Soko ever since she can remember. She’s trained as an actor and has several French films under her belt where she co-stars with celebrated French actors like Francoise Cluzet. True to her cute/dangerous persona, she’s been cast as a young femme-fatale in the past. And even more fitting, she most recently wrapped filming a movie where the seemingly ultra-feminine Soko plays a gritty boxer. Despite success, she doesn’t have aspirations to make it big. “I’m fat; I have a big ass that will never go away,” she laughs. “I don’t fit into the perfect Hollywood type. [Acting] is just giving what you can give and forging emotions and I don’t feel like I need to know who is watching.”

Soko got her break in making music when she approached filmmakers with her desire to sing for the movie she was in. “They asked, ‘have you ever sang for real?’” she says, “I said, ‘um, in the shower.’” Despite having no experience, she took a simple track she recorded on her mobile as a present for a friend and turned it into a demo. It was the realisation of something she’d always had a passion for. “First thing I do in the morning is turn on music,” she says. “My Ipod’s playlists are: ‘I’m happy’, ‘I’m sad’, ‘Let’s have sex’ etc. When friends come I ask them to do a playlist so when I miss them I play it and say, ‘that’s so you’, and ‘that’s so her’.”

Soko in sings in English, because she’s always listened to English songs. It’s a dicey decision for an artist should they be seeking commercial success. France has quotas for radio play that require a large portion of songs to be in the native language. Soko characteristically couldn’t care less. “Why would you have to choose something to please other people?” she asks.

She’s just returned from Cardiff where she holed herself up with the Welsh band Gorky's Psychotic Mynci, her personal favourites, whom she chose to help her produce her first album. Without even an album out, Soko is already drawing crowds for headlining gigs, much to her amazement. At a recent gig in Denmark, where upwards of 500 people sold out the show in four hours, she marvelled at the fact that the audience sang along to her songs. “When I started playing ‘I’ll Kill Her,’ the audience started singing louder than me. I started crying on stage,” she recounts, shocked and moved by their response. “I was trying to sing but the tears were rolling down my face.”

It’s a disarming to imagine the scenario, this lamb with lions’ claws being moved to tears, but Soko quickly switches back to her tough-girl persona. “I don’t want to please people. My goal in my life is not to be on the radio, it’s more selfish than that. It’s just my thing, about me.” If the music is about her, some questions remain. What’s with all the homicidal threats? Should we be worried? “I wouldn’t kill anything” she assures us, “but spiders, I f*cking hate them.”

Explore Student

• News

• Student Life

• How To Get A Job

• Gap Year

Times recommends

• University black hole as applicants surge
• Students to be offered 'no-fee degrees'
• Women are outperforming men at university