Earlier this year, M.I.A. said that her label, Interscope, refused to release her Matangi album because it was [article id="1699750"]"too positive,"[/article] and had instructed the strident singer to "darken it up a bit."

Well, it appears she listened, because on Monday night (June17), she unveiled the first single from the record, "Bring the Noize," and, well, it most certainly is dark, a knotty mix of chopped vocals, booming beats, pounding percussion and ominous synths that just builds and builds, until it eventually topples over onto itself. It's a claustrophobic track, to be certain, and a defiant one, too: at one point, M.I.A. declares "truth is like a rotten tooth, you got to spit it out," and later, she vents "it's not me and you, it's the f--ing banks."

Of course, though "Noize" is certainly nocturnal -- not to mention aptly named -- turns out, it still might not be dark enough for the folks at Interscope (or whichever subsidiary of the Universal Music Group she's currently signed to). Because as M.I.A. told BBC Radio 1 DJ Zane Lowe on Monday, she still has no idea when Matangi will see the light of day ... which is why she took the song to radio herself.

"This is my last stab at it," she told Lowe. "I keep finishing the record, handing it in, finishing the record, handing it in. I've given up at this point ... If I didn't get ['Bring the Noize'] out now, I would have definitely exploded."

And based on her Vine account, it appears M.I.A. may have shot a video for "Bring the Noize," too. At press time, there's no release date set for Matangi, and a spokesperson for UMG did not respond to MTV News' request for comment on the matter.