Shaky YouTube footage and TwitVid sneak peek aside, this is our first real taste of the new M.I.A. album, which is due out in June. Perhaps Diplo wasn’t entirely messing with us when he appended his claim that the new album would be “Animal Collective/gospel/giant-drum record” with this little nugget: “We did, like, a punk thing… It’s weird.”

There’s certainly some punk/acid rock in this stew (Stereogum says M.I.A. wrote the track with Suicide’s Alan Vega), as they most likely saved the “Wall of Sound, Motown kind of thing” for a different track.

MGMT and Gaga, take heed: this is what I would call pushing the envelope and challenging the mainstream. Listen to M.I.A.’s “Born Free” below (via P4K):

Earlier last fall, Diplo was the first to drop a few deets about M.I.A.’s forthcoming third album. His “description,” however, didn’t quite paint a clear picture: “It’s like Gucci Mane meets Animal Collective.” Hmm. Now with summer festival dates on the way, and speculation of a June/July album release brewing, Diplo has dropped a few more somewhat cryptic comments for us to obsess over.

“It’s sort of like an Animal Collective/gospel/giant-drum record,” he told MTV at SXSW last week. “And she’s singing on it. I think you might expect some rap/club music, but nothing on there. It’s more of a heavy record. All kinds of different sounds. We did, like, a punk thing. … It’s weird.”

That makes for a decently ambiguous MySpace genre tag, I suppose, but Diplo isn’t done teasing us:

Perhaps you haven’t noticed, but with new albums on the way from Arcade Fire (likely), LCD Soundsystem (def.), Spoon (yup), Leonard Cohen (?), and M.I.A. next year, it’s shaping up to be an epic ‘10. The anticipation for M.I.A.’s upcoming third LP is particularly high, as it will have been three years since her last album and the post-Pineapple Express explosion of “Paper Planes” (among other feats) has brought her into another realm of notoriety.

Pedstrian.tv got Diplo, a producer on both of M.I.A.’s previous albums, on the phone recently and we have our first quote about what Ms. Arulpragasam has in store: