On her 22nd birthday, Kimbra sashayed onto the stage at Webster Hall, in her first bona fide concert in New York, while her band vamped on a campy movie theme. She wore a short pink party dress with poofy sleeves and her hair in bangs and a flip, a retro 1960s do. She looked doll-like, a brunette version of Alice in Wonderland from a Disney film, but showing off more leg than Alice would. And when she began her first song, “Cameo Lover,” an upbeat plea to her man for intimacy, her voice was anything but innocent.

Some of the people crowding around the stage that night in March began to sing along, even though the song is not on American pop radio, and her first album, “Vows,” comes out in the United States on Tuesday. “I always imagined my first American tour might be pretty modest,” she said later. “What I was really surprised about was how many people knew the words to my songs already.” Her cross-country tour continues through July 7.

The star-making machinery at Warner Brothers Records is firmly behind Kimbra, who comes from New Zealand, and she has had a run of good publicity in the last year. She was the talk of the South by Southwest Music Festival in March, where she did eight sets over four days and impressed critics. Her first album, “Vows,” sold more than 100,000 in Australia (which qualifies as platinum there) after its release in August 2011, peaking at No. 4 on the Australian charts. Then she won an award for best new female artist from the Australian Recording Industry Association.

But what brought her to wider attention in this country was her duet with Gotye on “Somebody That I Used to Know,” a song that has become an international hit and has spent five weeks at No. 1 in the United States.