Watch Nicole Atkins's Neptune City Video

When she was a child, growing up in Neptune City, New Jersey, Nicole Atkins lived in a house by a river, above which a ghostly mist would already be rising as she got home from school on dark winter afternoons. Getting out of the car, she would run home as fast as she could, for fear of the monsters and phantoms that might ambush her if she lingered. She doesn’t, she says, run now, but the flights of fancy that coiled themselves around the imagination of that schoolgirl are still busy on the adult version.

The 29-year-old had a dream last year in which she was first riding a horse, then sitting down next to it on a porch swing, having a chat. Atkins asks the horse how he is (as you do), and he replies: “I feel really bad. I feel like you’re neglecting me, that you don’t love me any more.” When she tells me she thinks the horse represents her throat, and the damage she sometimes does to it, so determined is the set of her jaw that all thoughts of suggesting other interpretations – sexual desire, the poetic imagination, unruly passion – suddenly seem inappropriate. Besides, Atkins, with her endlessly churning brain, has probably got there already.

She isn’t only about whimsy, however. There is a hard New Jersey edge to the singer, too, and this sense of duality – between the melancholic and the carefree, the scuffed-jeans indie musician and the taffeta-clad, falsetto-rich chan-teuse, the sacred and the profane – is what gives her music its tension and her personality its endearing unpredictability. Having studied illustration in North Carolina, she has, she says, recently felt the pull of art again, and is working on huge charcoal canvases of, yes, horses. “They’re so beautiful, but they scare me,” she says. “You’re petting them and, at the same time, you’re thinking, ‘Wow, you could just kick my face in right now.’ ” When she signed to Columbia last year, Atkins did the rounds of top-name producers, looking for someone to helm her first album with her band, the Sea. “I met all these fancy names,” she recalls, “who, musically, I thought were amazing, but, personality-wise, they were so foofy – very well-heeled, in extravagant silk shirts; like, ‘I only make records for $700,000.’ ” She was beginning to worry that the project was taking too long to get off the ground when Tore Johansson (who has produced the Cardigans, Franz Ferdinand and New Order) rang from Sweden. “He called and said, ‘You know how dolls and children are scary but so beautiful at the same time? Well, that’s what your music reminds me of: I’m enchanted and creeped out simultaneously.’ And I said, ‘When can I come visit you?’ ” Atkins is part of a group of new American female singers (see below) who are producing work that is thrillingly bold, mystifying and complex, yet accessible, comprehensible and distinctive.

On her debut album, Neptune City, Atkins’s extraordinary voice – part Roy Orbison, part Loretta Lynn – soars and swoops through a sequence of country-noir and psychedelic-soul songs that celebrate and excoriate lovers, cast nostalgic glances back to when her home town was thriving and pay tribute to the family and friends who sustained her during the years when she was writing songs, but getting nowhere.

The record was well reviewed when it came out last year in America, but sales have been slow, owing to the fact that it was put on hold just a week before release. The producer Rick Rubin, newly arrived as co-chairman of Columbia, called Atkins with the bad news. “He said, ‘I can’t put this album out. Your voice is too buried.’ He tried to remix it for ages in different ways, then suddenly he called me up one day and went, ‘Yo, dude, I think I got a pass. I took the mastering off.’ ” (So that’s how genius works – removing the final layer of studio sheen to find a pearl underneath.) At a stroke, Atkins says, the album burst forth in full colour. With all the promotion running around the original release date, however, momentum was lost. She’s sanguine about this, but her frustration is clear: she has made one of the most remarkable albums by an American female singer in years and, for the moment at least, it’s relying on word of mouth. “Everybody’s like, ‘Why isn’t this bigger, why isn’t it on the radio?’ ” she says.

It’s a fair question. Her new single, Maybe Tonight, which sounds like the Ronettes doing a residency on the Jersey Shore, should be all over the playlists like a rash. Say this to Atkins and she comes out with a characteristic one-two. “That song that almost brought you to tears,” she muses rhetorically, “because it doesn’t have the same beat as every other track on the radio, maybe that’ll be the song to make you pull over. Or the song that makes people have sex in their cars again.”

Today, Atkins lives just up the shore in Asbury Park, after spells in Manhattan, Australia and at university. The weekend we meet, her adopted home town seems to be enjoying its own microclimate, just like her album: spells of radiant sunshine, sheet lightning and thunder, impenetrable coastal fogs. If the sun throws the sidewalk cafes and vintage-clothes stores into sharply attractive relief, the sea frets sweeping suddenly in off the Atlantic are a reminder of how claustrophobic, spooky and cut-off the place must seem as a permanent home. You understand the album more clearly.

As her sales build and her tours sell out, Atkins is content to play a long game. “Everything I’m doing right now is exactly what I want to be doing,” she says. “Anything else I would consider a bonus.” Europe is already swooning over her album, and doing a double take about her singing voice. Does she realise how powerful it is? “It’s the only thing in my life that I’m not self-conscious about,” she sort of answers. “You’ve got to have one thing that you don’t totally hate about yourself.” A stellar talent with self-esteem issues? Perhaps the horse needs to have a word.

Maybe Tonight is released on May 26 on Columbia; Neptune City follows on June 2. Nicole Atkins & the Sea play the Soho Revue Bar, W1, on Tuesday

Girl powers

Jesca Hoop A former nanny to Tom Waits’s children, this Californian throws multiple ingredients (neo-folk, chamber-pop, tribal rhythms, treated vocals, allusion and allegory) into the blender, then gleefully throws the switch. The result is unnerving but unforgettable. jescahoop.com

My Brightest Diamond The second album from the classically trained Shara Worden, from Michigan, is A Thousand Shark’s Teeth (June 2). It captures everything that’s so jaw-dropping about her: ambitious instrumentation, operatic vocals, influences from Tricky to Ravel, Lewis Carroll to Anselm Kiefer. mybrightestdiamond.com

Brooke Waggoner This Nashville musician began playing the piano at four and studied classical music for 17 years. Her debut EP, Fresh Pair of Eyes, found her parlaying this knowledge into six songs of sublime pop, pitch-black vaudeville, country-blues and modern chamber music. One of the most exciting releases to come out of America last year. brookewaggonermusic.com

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