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What with her eccentric, controversial yet iconic style - and music and match - 20-year-old Aurora Storm is currently causing a sensation in the UK, where her vivid indie-edge debut single ‘Smother’ has charted in the Top 10. Her sassy, bad-girl act echoes that of childhood idols Janis Joplin and Madonna. "I look to Madonna for her philosophy about music and fashion," she admits. "If I'm going to get compared to any music artist, I sure as fuck want it to be her."

Raised in the heart of London, Aurora attended the £17,000-a-year Sylvia Young Theatre School in Marylebone, where she studied music and performing arts alongside Rita Ora and Tom Fletcher. 'I didn't hang out with all the popular girls," she says, claiming to have kept her head down and focused on her art and theatre studies. To the humiliation of her parents – extremely successful lawyers - she ended up moving downtown at just 17 years old following a serious argument she had with her family. Aurora did everything she could to get by – working in a small café at minimal wage and occasionally partaking in nude modeling and busking on the streets of London to songs that she had written in her spare time, just so she could have a roof over her head and place food on her plate every night. “I was doing drugs, I was really out of control," she says. "But what made me different was that I was making music, too. I wasn't just doing drugs."

Her antics caught the eye of musical-director Caius Pawson, (Founder of The XX, Sampha) who found her busking at Camden Lock, before bringing her to the attention of Young Turks Records. Aurora’s debut album Porcelain is released in the UK this month, and she plans to take just herself, her guitar and her music worldwide. But Aurora insists that it’s not all about the marketing and publicity. “I could end up in America selling thousands of records or I could go back to how things were before when no one really knew my name and few people purchased my music, and it wouldn’t matter to me. All that matters is the music. I don’t give a shit about how many records are sold – as long as I am making music for the people I love, then I’m happy.”

  

There’s no denying the fact that Aurora is all that everyone is talking about right now – her seemingly overnight success is what has got her to where she is now. When asked if this is the “most insane year” of her life so far, the singer-song writer says, “Everything is so chaotic and crazy right now and it’s so much all at once, but I’m living for it. I’m just having the best time ever and everything’s falling into place like it’s supposed to. I don’t really care if people hate me. I think anyone wanting to pursue a music career would have given anything to be me at that very moment where I blew up, because I was being one hundred percent true to myself… and not many people can say that.”

But it’s not all hate for Aurora. This fact is a kind of icing on the cake for some, who have greeted Aurora not just as the latest, new, indie sensation to appear freshly baked off the assembly line, but as a kind of Trojan horse come to deliver us from the saccharine smiles and full-frontal sexual provocation clogging the charts. “The charts are constantly filled up with pop songs with no meaning, no real passion… just a different combination of the 26 letters in our alphabet accompanied by a stupid tune. Who wants to listen to that?! That’s what I want to change.” Aurora’s sharp narrative observations – on both the single, and her critically acclaimed follow-up album, Porcelain – have led to her being labeled the voice of her generation.

When we meet, Aurora can barely sit upright. “I came down with a kidney infection just as I was about to get on a plane here,” she says. “They took me into hospital and put me on a drip and now I’m on heavy-duty antibiotics.” With her gothically pale skin offset by dark, red lips, black-rimmed wide-set eyes and her bold, statement full fringe, it’s not hard to see why she attracts the attention that she does – even when she’s ill she manages to look flawless. She looks much older than she is, a perception reinforced by the deep, commanding timbre of her sonorous voice.

On stage the previous night at Brixton Academy, Aurora had betrayed no sign of her illness, or that she had only 20 live performances under her belt. Aurora performed a mix of emotional ballads and when she reached the dramatic climax of the song, she vaults to the top of her range and produces a piercing sound that shakes you to the core. That is the power of the whistle register; the ability to control that part of the human voice is quite rare (think Mariah Carey) and even when ill, Aurora is able to hit way beyond the whistle register. In performance, Aurora has a goofy theatricality: one minute she is indulging in closed-eyed singing whilst simply sat with her guitar, shaking her hair and flicking her hands out; the next, she’s all broad smiles and wisecracks, jokily mocking her audience. Aurora was born with the ability to be a performer and that’s quite hard to find these days.

‘‘Songwriting is so weird because you are writing down intimate things and then you go into a studio with someone you have never met,” she says. “But it was a strange situation where something just clicked. My team were very good at being perceptive and figuring out what I do, which is quite a raw, impulsive thing.”

Over the past year and a half, from 2011, Aurora and her team came up with the 10 songs for her debut album, but Aurora says it never crossed her mind that one might become a worldwide hit. She insisted her first songs be put out on free streaming service SoundCloud without any videos or photographs to promote them. “I put my music out with no kind of commercial expectation, and found out I was a ‘star’. I didn’t see my music as number-one Billboard chart selling music,” she says. “I tried to market my music the way my favourite indie producers did. I care more about giving back to my fans and the people that I love than selling my music worldwide – don’t get me wrong, it’s an absolute honour to be doing what I’m doing but I don’t want to become a marketing product like most pop artists these days. I’m much deeper than that.”

While other mainstream pop acts such as Katy Perry, One Direction and Britney Spears turn to the same small pool of producers in London, Stockholm and LA who deal in radio-friendly generic dance styles, more-experimental acts such as Kanye West or Lady Gaga elect complicated, flamboyant and ostentatious compositions. By contrast, Aurora’s sound is simple yet cinematic, spinning tales of real teenage realities – penniless but happy nights out full of longing and loneliness – that reject clichés of mindless fun and decadence.

“I don’t intend on selling dreams to young people. We’re now brought up believing that you have to live and behave in a certain way to get the best out of life – but that’s completely wrong. Look at Disney for example; as a child I thought I was going to be a princess, just like most little girls do… but that’s not going to happen. Being a teenager and growing up in this generation isn’t what people expect. Y’know, constant partying, your first kiss, being prom queen, falling in love… it’s not what it seems. It’s all bullshit. Growing up is one of the most difficult periods of time that you can experience – yes, it can be great, but just like everything there’s a downfall and people need to be more aware of that. That’s why I write about my experiences. I’ve gone from rock bottom right to the top; I want my music to reflect on this – not everyone is perfect and I want my music to help people through the reality of life… not this perfect picture that generic music seems to constantly portray.”

Aurora possesses a maturity that is, for now, inoculating her from the madness growing around her. “What I am doing now, I am learning so much that I couldn’t learn at any university at any age,” she says. “Every time I get on stage I learn something new. I’m evolving all the time. My next record could sound completely different.”

Aurora’s album, Porcelaine, is out November 26^th.