Jessy Moss might look like a model, but she sounds like the street-smart, raspy-voiced lovechild of Sinead O’Connor and Eminem, should the two ever decide to spawn. One earful of the singer/rapper’s catchy flow on her debut album, Street Knuckles, proves there’s plenty of punch behind this six-foot-tall, 25-year-old knockout.

Moss’s roots are in the east Australian surf town of Byron Bay, where she was raised on a steady diet of mostly late-’80s/early-’90s East Coast American hip-hop. That and seeing the Beastie Boys perform in her home country are what started her rattling off drunken rhymes of her own “out in the [Australian] bush, in the middle of nowhere.” Inspired, she set out to make her sometime hobby a full-fledged career. Moss paid her dues early with a slew of crap jobs in England and Australia, culminating in her move to the U.S. in 1998 for an unpaid internship at Total Access, a SoCal recording studio where No Doubt, Guns N’ Roses, Sublime, and numerous others have laid tracks. She absorbed all she could about audio engineering, which led to her first paid gig: doing live sound on tour for the Long Beach Dub All-Stars. Moss had the good fortune to then meet Cypress Hill’s DJ Muggs, who was so impressed with her talent that he asked her to appear on their 2001 Stoned Raiders release.

That cameo may have given her the proverbial foot in the music industry’s door, but two years later, she’s kicked it wide open on her own. Moss signed with DreamWorks Records in 2001, recording Street Knuckles and embarking on her Sprite-sponsored U.S. tour a short while later. She used her recording-studio education to co-produce Street Knuckles with famed Nirvana/Garbage producer Butch Vig, Camara Kambon (Eminem, Dr. Dre), and Rick Hahn. A “knuckle” in Australian slang is a “a little gem, a story,” she explains. Each song here is just that, luring the unsuspecting listener into her world. From the bluesy ballad “Build You Up” to the biting cut “Landbitch” (about an evil slumlord) to the anti–money worshipping sentiment of “Owed a Living” and the hilarious, tongue-in-cheek bravado of “The Baddest” (“I’m the baddest, the biggity biggity baddest”), this woman is indeed writing what she knows. “Confessions,” the shining jewel of the collection, depicts a harrowing home invasion the singer endured, eloquently told in freestyle-flow rhyme from the perspective of the attackers. The effect is chilling, yet revealing of Moss’s resilient nature. “It’s been therapeutic,” she says of performing the narrative live. “I wasn’t physically hurt myself. These guys were like old-school gangsters and a lot of old-school gangsters won’t hit a girl, but my boys got pretty f—ked up in front of me. My boys got cut with a machete and hit with a baseball bat and shit like that, so…watching it was pretty bad.”

These days, life’s not so hard. When not touring or recording, Moss spends her days cruising around her new home in Long Beach, California, on her skateboard. “Living in the LB is similar to Australia, but it’s still Western culture,” she explains. “I like the sprawling city of L.A. I like industry as much as nature and beaches.” The transplant says she spends her time “drinking a lot, writing a lot, and rocking out to the Distillers, Queens of the Stone Age, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, or Wu-Tang Clan.” But don’t let the diverse tastes fool you. “My own music’s not punk,” she laughs, “but my attitude is.”