Earlier this month, M.I.A. addressed the possibility of leaking her forthcoming album. “I would love to leak it,” the London-based artist also known as Mathangi “Maya” Arulpragasam said in a Periscope response to fan questions. “I wake up every day and think I’m gonna leak it.” She said she ultimately sides against it—at least for now, knowing her history—but both the medium and the message were classic M.I.A.: embracing new means of communication while verbally sparring with the powers-that-be.

“If I carry on making music, then I would [leak it], but I also want to find an album where I can actually make my label work for me,” she continued. “Maybe I can’t lie enough, which is why I can’t be making a mainstream record. But my songs on this album are pretty non-offensive, and if they get offended by this, then I give up and I’m gonna go back to saying whatever the fuck I want wherever I want to, even on Periscope. I can put a beat on every day and just chat over it.”

Days earlier, M.I.A. tweeted that she was giving her American label, Interscope, her “last LP.” She added that it would be up to the label whether to release the album, given that she doesn’t have a visa allowing her to promote it in the United States. More recently, in a separate Periscope chat, M.I.A. said that she plans to release the album in July.

Whenever and however the follow-up to 2013’s Matangi arrives, it will be difficult for M.I.A. to find a new way of provoking the record industry and beyond. She's not only consistently released her music outside of traditional channels, she's challenged the pop-star hierarchy while finding her own place in it. Sometimes the results have been near-universally celebrated (her New Year’s Eve 2010 surprise free-mixtape, Vicki Leekx). Sometimes they have been personally and professionally costly (see: M.I.A.'s unique place in Super Bowl history). Whether triumph or trainwreck, M.I.A.’s challenges to the music business and the broader media infrastructure that surrounds it have usually been must-watch events, so we figured it was time to roll back the tapes all the way to the beginning.

2004

Summer 2004: M.I.A. releases “Sunshowers,” the second single from her then-upcoming debut album, Arular, following her viral breakout “Galang.” In a pre-YouTube era when music videos are harder to see, MTV bans the Rajesh Touchriver-directed “Sunshowers” clip. The ban is reportedly because M.I.A. refused to remove the lyrics “You wanna go? You wanna winna war? Like PLO, I don’t surrendo.” It’s an early premonition of how M.I.A.’s radical music and politics would spur media controversy.

Late 2004: M.I.A. and Diplo’s unofficial Piracy Funds Terrorism mixtape makes the rounds for free at shows and online. It contains many of the vocals from the long-delayed Arular. So one of the public’s first big impressions of M.I.A. came through, essentially, a self-leak.

2005

Early 2005: An M.I.A. discussion thread on the online forum I Love Music veers from anticipation of Arular to political debate. As Robert Christgau later recounts in a big Village Voice piece on her politics, steering the discussion were “two Sri Lankans exiled by ethnic conflict.”