In Martina Sorbara’s video for her hit single “I Get Around,” she vamps and writhes like a modern day Bettie Page on ecstasy. Clad alternately in gold lamé, black leather and (the ultimate in you-know-you-want-me kitsch) a form-fitting man’s suit, she makes out with almost everyone in her path. In case you still don’t get it, she spells it out in the song’s lusty lyrics: “Here I come when I oughta go. I say yes when I oughta say no.” The lead singer of the London-based electro-pop outfit Dragonette has been making palms sweaty since the 2007 release of the band’s debut album, Galore, a collection of provocative, flesh-filled dance tracks that had critics likening her to Gwen Stefani and Ace of Base (albeit an “edgy, sexually voracious Ace of Base”). Sorbara, who grew up just outside Toronto, is the youngest daughter of Ontario’s former finance minister Greg Sorbara. The lineage, while unnotable across the pond, makes her all the more gossip worthy in her hometown, where she regularly fields questions along the lines of, “Does your dad like watching you play a naughty nurse?” (Answer: What do you think?)

In person, the 30-year-old is more of an anti-vixen. Her energy is manic, not sultry—more Betty Boop than Bettie Page—as she ricochets from thought to thought, chattering in a cartoonishly squeaky voice. As for her band’s R-rated reputation, “Our songs are more complicated than that,” she says, curling up on a leather couch at the Gladstone Hotel. “I’m putting forth a sexuality that isn’t like, say, Beyoncé or Shakira.” Her music, she explains, is all about modern female empowerment (of the leather-clad and ball-busting variety).

Sorbara and the rest of the band—which includes her husband, Dan Kurtz, on bass, as well as drummer Joel Stouffer and guitarist Will Stapleton—are in Toronto writing and recording their as-yet-untitled sophomore release, and will return in December to play Nathan Phillips Square. The new material has a lot to live up to. Galore was embraced by the notoriously bitchy British media—The Guardian

Before hitting it big as an electro-vamp, the MPP’s daughter was best known as a Toronto chanteuse perpetually on the verge. Riding the post–Lilith Fair rush to sign girls with guitars, she released two albums (the second one, The Cure for Bad Deeds, secured a devoted if smallish fan base) and appeared in NOW magazine flanked by her homemade guitars. Sorbara’s solo sound was folksy and earnest—today she calls it “tamponic”—the opposite of what she’s doing now. She and Kurtz are both apt to poke fun at the “Women & Songs era,” but Sorbara won’t cop to a total musical metamorphosis. She’s still just writing country songs, she says, while Kurtz (whose musical pedigree includes membership in the electro-band The New Deal) provides the slinky backbeat.

So “Competition”—which addresses stealing another girl’s boyfriend—is Sorbara’s “Jolene”? She giggles. “Maybe, but I’m Jolene.” The musical reference is a nod to the fact that she and Kurtz first hooked up at a Halifax rock festival in 2002, while he was in an- other relationship. “Dan’s ex is really gonna hate reading this,” she says, “but less than a week after we met, we were talking about driving across Europe.” It was messy and torrid, documented vividly in the urgent tracks on Galore. The move to London came about two years after their 2003 wedding, motivated, says Sorbara, by a sense of adventure, not the desire to escape Toronto’s notoriously indie-favouring music scene (London was also “filled with wanky, wanky indie rock” when they arrived). It’s stating the obvious to say the couple’s personal dynamic drives Dragonette’s sound. Five years into marriage, their new material, like their sex life (“there’s less sex,” she admits), is tamer. “More love songs,” she says, calling their current head space “jolly and giddy.”

The evolution in tone will probably mean less, um, empowering content on the new album, a welcome adjustment for at least one fan: Sorbara’s doting father. The Liberal (but not that liberal) politician has admitted his preference for her pre-Dragonette sound, although even he understands that staying current and cultivating an image is all part of the process. Naughty nurses or not.