LONDON -- The last we heard from Lene Grawford Nystrom in a big way, she was chirping the No. 1 bubble-gum hit, Barbie Girl, as frontwoman for Aqua.

The dance-pop anthem propelled the Danish band's 1997 debut disc, Aquarium, to staggering worldwide sales of 30 million. Six years later, the singer now goes simply by the name Lene, with a marginally more serious-sounding solo debut, Play With Me.

"The style is very electro-punk-rock-urban, lots of different elements from different styles of music," says the pretty and petite Norwegian-born singer, 29, seated in the curtained-off pool table room of the ultra-cool Sanderson Hotel in Soho. "I'd say the main thing is guitars going through it all, and there's a deeper level in my voice."

Not only is Lene's sound more grown-up but the lyrics are more sexually suggestive than during her Aqua days, although you may recall Mattel wasn't very pleased with Barbie Girl's lyrics -- "You can brush my hair, undress me everywhere" -- and even launched a lawsuit that was eventually dismissed.

On Play With Me's first single, It's Your Duty, Lene sings: "Handcuff up your boss, yeah be rough / He might like it, like it / He'll get a rise, you'll get a raise / Don't tell his wife about it." But Lene's not worried about courting controversy again. "I mean, it's a cheeky lyric (but) compared to all of the other stuff that's out there at the moment, it's not too bad I guess."

Lene also says she's not out to reinvent herself after creating such a strong, almost cartoonish image with Aqua, who utilized brightly coloured videos. "I've just tried to move on and take what was good with Aqua with me," she said. "I'm just more grown up. I feel I can do a bit more edgy lyrics, push it a little bit, be a little bit naughty."

In case you're wondering whatever happened to Aqua, the band amicably split up in 2001 after releasing their sophomore effort Aquarius. But Lene managed to hold on to drummer Soren Rasted, whom she married. "When the band split, we just kind of found each other," she says. "We never had a fling or anything. It's just suddenly one night we just saw each other (with new eyes)."

Surprisingly, Rasted almost wasn't involved in the making of Play With Me. "I had a really difficult time writing with him after I married him," says Lene. "'Cause the feeling kind of changed. I just felt it was really hard to sing with him. To kind of give my emotions away.

"But now it's fine 'cause he wrote a really, really good ballad (Scream) for me, which we co-wrote the lyrics on. And it's about my eating disorder in the past. When I went in to sing on it, it was no problem. 'Okay. I can work with you again.'"