Maya Arulpragasam aka MIA has just released her second album Kala. Her work is fresh, provocative and original and she's a 'refugee' from Sri Lanka.

In 2005, she released her first album Arula, naming it after her father's alias.

Maya is a Sri Lankan Tamil, and comes from a political family and her father is a member of a Tamil political group that advocates for the rights of the ethnic Tamils living on the island.

Now, she's launched her second album - Kala. Here's what Rolling Stones magazine wrote about both her productions:

Arular was about M.I.A. -- her ambition, her education, her contradictions, her history of violence. Kala is about the brown-skinned Other now obsessing Euro-America -- described from the outside by a brown-skinned sympathizer who's an insider for as long as her visa holds up.

Her cross-cultural background and connections with a dirty war in Sri Lanka has exposed her to a broad audience. Here's what NPR's All Things Considered had to say about her work:

At a time when globalization is both dissolving and reinforcing national identities, M.I.A.'s music speaks from a blurry borderland through a lingua franca of agitated, propulsive pop. The energy should be familiar to restless youth almost anywhere. Aptly enough, one of the recurring sounds that shout out from the album are the voices of children.

Most of Kala was recorded in different cities in India, Trinidad, Angola — more than half a dozen locations around the world. On her first album, M.I.A. imported the sounds of Sao Paolo favelas and Kingston shantytowns into her studios; with Kala, she went mobile, making it a point to record on location as much as possible. The noisy clash of voices and rhythms makes Kala sound like it's from everywhere and nowhere at once.

Her website has a selection of music videos from her first and second albums - all unique and worth checking out.

Sunshowers is from her first album. Watch it below.