YENDRY Finally Does It on Her Own Terms with Debut Album Como Agua and Second Tiny Desk Performance

“The limitless pop star of tomorrow.”

“One of the industry’s most promising young singers.”

“A rising star in Latin music.”

Read together, these sound like the sort of accolades that might accompany YENDRY’s long-awaited debut album, Como Agua, released on Friday, September 18th.

Except they aren’t from 2026. They’re all real descriptions of the Dominican singer published by the likes of Pitchfork and Vogue back  in 2021. Since then, she’s performed an intimate studio session for the music series COLORS and a Tiny Desk home concert, taken part in several international tours, and amassed millions of streams. Yet somehow YENDRY feels like she’s still an up-and-comer.

“A lot of people ask me, ‘Is this your first album?’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, I’m just getting started,’” YENDRY tells Consequence. “And they’re like, ‘No, you’re not just getting started.’ And I’m like, ‘Yes, I am. I’m just getting started.’”

From the outside, YENDRY’s career trajectory might come off as almost deliberate, as if she has been calmly tiptoeing the frontiers of stardom while waiting for her big chance. But the truth is that her long-gestating debut also has a lot to do with the growing pains of realizing that, beyond the artistry of it all, the music industry is, well, very much an industry.

She recalls, for example, a “very toxic” relationship with a former manager and periods when she had no money because, she says, it “never got to me.”  With no family or close friends in the music business to help her navigate it, she was forced to learn the mechanics of the industry as she went.

“When you don’t really know what you’re doing and you trust people who you think know what they’re doing,” she reflects, “sometimes you can lose yourself a little.” Eventually, that cycle caught up with her and she hit burnout while, for the casual fan, she still seemed to be moving steadily upward.

Como Agua, which translates to Like Water, is YENDRY’s attempt to find her way back.

“This is an album I made to heal, to come back to music, to come back to my love for music,” she says. Fittingly, its title draws a parallel between her own journey and the resilience of water: “We’re always adapting, changing shape, adapting to new contexts,” she explains. “Water molds rock to make its own path.”

For YENDRY, that metaphor is also deeply personal. Born in the Dominican Republic but raised in Italy, the sea became a constant across the different places where she lived, somewhere she could retreat whenever she needed to reconnect. Since moving to Los Angeles a few years ago as her career was taking off, she has found herself returning to the sea. “I’ve always seen water as home,” she says.

Movement also gives Como Agua its loose emotional arc. The 13 songs move freely between family, migration, homesickness, romantic relationships, and the loneliness that can come with building a life across countries. “La Bendición,” for example, opens the album with the pulse of Dominican palo, an Afro-Dominican musical tradition built around drums and call-and-response vocals. From there, the bolero “Mala Mía” finds YENDRY examining her own emotional unavailability in a past relationship. On “Mentira,” she wrestles with the self-doubt behind her impostor syndrome; “Amapolas” confronts the strange fragmentation of having one version of herself in Italy and another in Los Angeles; and the merengue “No Me Vuelvo a Enamorar,” driven by güira and tambora, looks toward the Dominican Republic and the first love she left there.

“Espejo,” perhaps the most emotional track on the album, turns the lens toward her family, tracing her complicated relationship with her Dominican father, whom she didn’t meet until she was 18. Conceived as something of a letter she never sent him, the song documents her attempt to repair that relationship, one that she says has since grown much healthier.

Having accumulated so many miles as a migrant has also provided YENDRY with a rich tapestry of musical influences, all of which find their way into different passages of Como Agua. The Dominican flair is obvious, with everything from merengue to bachata and reggaeton coming through. But the inclusion of a ballad like “Un dolore raro,” sung in Italian, reveals her love for the country’s songwriting tradition and artists like Raffaella Carrà and Luigi Tenco.

That broad map of influences was one of the reasons she gravitated toward London-born producer Blue May to help shape her album. “I didn’t want to lose the European part,” she explains. “I always try to keep both worlds alive.” That part of her musical upbringing extends beyond Italy, too: growing up there, she was drawn to British acts like Radiohead, Björk, and Massive Attack, an eclectic listening diet she credits with making her “much more open” and “much more receptive” whenever she enters a studio.

Through it all, perhaps the most lasting effect Como Agua has had on YENDRY is that, after years of self-doubt, she has learned to trust herself. “I needed to make what I believe in and what I feel,” she recalls telling her team. “This is something I’ll be able to promote, I’ll be able to perform, I’ll be able to sing while believing in it. So believe me.” That meant leaving her vocals raw rather than using Auto-Tune, and building arrangements around percussion, strings, and musicians playing together. “It was a very intimate, very honest, very natural and organic process,” she says.

Her confidence has extended beyond the studio. Years after recording a Tiny Desk (Home) Concert during the pandemic, YENDRY finally makes it to NPR’s actual desk on Tuesday, September 22nd, this time relishing the challenge of rearranging her songs for the famously stripped-down setting. She admits she “panicked” before filming, but there was something fitting about reaching the milestone by simply playing music with people she trusts.

“Sometimes I do incredible things, but I’m already thinking about what comes next,” she admits. “I finished Tiny Desk and said, ‘The next one, I want to do it like this.’ And then I tell myself, ‘YENDRY, please.’”

I suggest that maybe, after finally getting Como Agua out into the world, she owes herself some time to simply enjoy it.

“Yeah, I’m working on that,” she says with a smile.