'Bats for Lashes' album cover from 'The Haunted Man'. (Handout)

'Bat for Lashes' star Natasha Khan has defended her controversial nude photograph on the cover of her latest album, insisting the image was intended to be "natural and non-sexual".

The singer/songwriter stripped off and posed with a naked man slung over her shoulders in the artwork for 'The Haunted Man,' taken by New York photographer Ryan McGinley.

Khan admits the idea for the shoot came to her in a "really strong epiphany" and insists the black-and-white snap matches the mood of her new "stripped back" sound.

She tells the BBC, "I love (McGinley) as a photographer and I've been into him for a long time. I actually came across some of his work which he did with people holding wild animals and wolves and things like that and I just had this really strong epiphany in my head: 'Oh, I want to be carrying a man.'

"I think that goes really well with the theme of the record. I also (liked) his approach to the body and women and men and just being quite stripped back - I'm not wearing any make-up. It's not a sexual image, it's more like just really stripping everything back and being really raw. I think nowadays there's so much emphasis on people, what they're wearing, their make-up, their styling - you know, there's like 40 people styling everyone. I got a bit jaded with all of that and I just wanted to take it right back to being really natural and direct... and presenting that in a non-sexual way."