Dessa’s earrings aren’t mere accessories; in her act, she has a pair of miniature schnauzers jump through them.

The Minnesota-based MC known as Dessa gives two answers when asked for her take on the hip-hop scene in her hometown of Minneapolis.

On the one hand, even if the likes of Brother Ali and Atmosphere have yet to achieve the market saturation of a Jay-Z or an Eminem, she argues they’re pretty much stars, thereby making the scene that birthed them anything but underground.

“I’ve been backpacking with my best friend in Brazil, and someone there mentioned Atmosphere,” Dessa says, on her cellphone on a highway just outside of Lawrence, Kansas. “I friggin’ pissed my pants. I had no idea—no idea—that the music had travelled that far, both geographically and across language barriers.”

At the same time, you only have to look at the level that Dessa and most of her fellow Minneapolis MCs operate at to realize that most of those toiling in that city’s hip-hop trenches aren’t doing it for fame or money.

“Most of us are doing our business on a relatively DIY ethic,” she says. “We don’t have a major label there, and very few people are working with really big-name distributors. Most of us book and promote our own shows, so, in that way, it does feel underground. Or maybe ”˜independent’ is more descriptive.”

Whatever you want to call it, there’s no denying that Minneapolis has become a grassroots hip-hop hotbed. The latest case for that is made by Dessa’s just-released debut album, A Badly Broken Code. The record is a next-step extension of her work with Doomtree, a Twin Cities collective of rappers, producers, and DJs she’s performed with for the past half-decade. And Doomtree has left its mark on the album, with members of the group—which includes Dessa’s current tourmate P.O.S., producer MK Larada, and DJ Turbo Nemesis—helping out on production. The resulting tracks serve up everything from dirty-’30s jazz (“Dixon’s Girl”) to swaggering R&B (“The Bullpen”).

“The producers on the album who are featured most heavily are [Doomtree’s] Paper Tiger and MK Larada,” Dessa says. “A lot of the nuances you hear is their work. Then it’s up to me to figure out the structure of the song—verse, chorus, bridge—and figure out where the pieces go.”

With a support crew that was more than willing to work with her every idea, figuring out what went where was relatively easy for Dessa. Committing her lyrics to tape was another matter.

“I record in my closet,” she says. “So you have headphones on and you’re facing a microphone and a vocal booth hangs from the ceiling. Sometimes I would get distracted by the sounds of my own voice coming through the headphones, instead of worrying about how I felt delivering it [the lyrics]. It’s like ”˜If you want to sound like a badass, you should probably just be a badass and start rapping, instead of trying to manipulate your voice to convey badassery.’ ”

Once she got confident, Dessa—whose lyrics touch on everything from severe relationship regrets to kicking ass in a male-dominated game—didn’t limit herself on the mike. On A Badly Broken Code she’s as much at ease playing throwback-jazz torch singer in the smoky “Poor Atlas” as she is dropping the cool and collected veil to tap into her inner demons in the slow-build chiller “Mineshaft II”. It adds up to a clinic that’s got her pegged as an artist to watch by everyone from Spin to NPR.

“Sometimes I would get a little distracted by the science of it all,” Dessa admits. “Eventually, I learned to just go back to the emotive nature of it and just trust that listeners—whether I felt badass or blue or overjoyed—would hear that for themselves.”

Dessa plays the Biltmore Cabaret with P.O.S. tonight (February 11).