For much of her life, the rising singer-songwriter Yendry has found herself repeatedly asked to explain where she truly belongs. Born in Santo Domingo, raised in Turin, Italy, and now based in Los Angeles, she has long navigated the intricate, often isolating spaces between different cultures, identities, and versions of herself. Time and again, she has discovered that she doesn’t quite fit neatly into any single cultural label or geographic box.
In the Dominican Republic, she is often told by locals that she lacks a traditional Dominican accent. In Italy, where she spent her formative years, people routinely remark that she does not look stereotypically Italian. Upon relocating to Los Angeles, she found herself facing yet another new environment where fitting in was far from automatic. Musically, she has faced a similar struggle, finding it difficult to define her sound within the rigid boundaries of a single genre.
However, with the arrival of her long-awaited debut solo album, Como Agua, Yendry is signaling that she no longer wishes to force herself into a predetermined box. Set for release on September 18, the album is a deeply personal and introspective exploration of migration, identity, healing, and self-discovery. The project was born out of a severe period of burnout that ultimately forced her to confront emotional baggage and parts of her past she had spent years actively avoiding. Structured across three distinct emotional pillars—the remedy, the ritual, and the mirror—Yendry examines her complex relationship with her roots, her family, her professional ambitions, and the heavy expectations she has carried for years.
The album’s title serves as a potent metaphor for where Yendry finds herself today. For the artist, water is far more than a simple symbol of her vibrant Caribbean roots; it has evolved into a profound philosophy for understanding what it means to move through the world as an immigrant.
"The way water exists in different forms—when I realized it, it blew my mind," Yendry shared in an interview. "Water molds the rocks. It really paves its own path. And I think I felt the same way when I migrated again for the second time in my life, from Italy to L.A., for a personal choice as an adult. That’s why I wanted to call this album Como Agua because I feel like now I’m flowing and that’s a universal immigrant experience."
That realization, however, did not happen overnight. Much of Yendry’s life has been defined by the exhausting need to constantly explain herself—both to external inquisitors and, at times, to her own reflection.
"I struggle so much to define myself, and I think my job requires me to do that a lot," she explained. "Not just musically, but when I meet people, and they ask me, ‘What kind of music do you make?’ I’m like, ‘Oh, I don’t know how to classify that.’ Or, ‘What kind of genre of music do you have? I have no idea, man.’ Or, ‘Where are you really from, because you don’t look Italian?’ It’s been part of my life having to explain myself, and this happens everywhere."
For years, that inability to fit neatly into a tidy category created intense internal pressure to define herself more precisely to satisfy the world around her. But today, Yendry says that urgency has completely dissipated.
"I think that will always be part of my life, but at the same time I think that’s what brought me to dive deeply into who I am, where I come from, what am I? In the past, I felt way more pressure to label myself," she reflected. "But now I don’t care anymore. I don’t care about doing it… and once you know who you are, you don’t care too much about how people label you."
That newfound freedom, nevertheless, has not entirely erased the profound loneliness that often accompanies belonging to multiple places at once. In previous interviews, Yendry has spoken candidly about the quiet isolation of never feeling completely at home anywhere. Through the creation of Como Agua, she has been able to lean into that feeling and explore its nuances rather than running from it.
"I think I know now that two things can exist—can coexist. I do know I belong to these places more deeply, but I still feel the loneliness of not belonging completely to a place, or not being able to stay in one place," she admitted. "I’m always going to go back to Italy, always going to go back to the art. But because there are these people there, like my mom, who will take me back there at some point in my life, but at the same time I won’t be able to stay there."
Rather than trying to eliminate that inherent contradiction, Yendry has learned to let these opposing truths coexist peacefully. The heavy internal work of understanding herself truly began during a time when she was running on fumes, emotionally and physically.
"I was coming from a burnout, overworking myself, and not getting what I aspired to, and from the outside, everyone thought I was okay," she recalled. "I was not sure how to dig deeper into who I am, into my roots, into my art, into why I never felt like I belonged to Italy, but at the same time I love it. My relationship with my dad—there were so many things that just came out, and I think naturally when I started going to therapy, when I started learning how to put boundaries, taking care of myself in a new city, in L.A., all this stuff came up because I was already working on myself."
The album became an invaluable vehicle for Yendry to ask herself those deeper, necessary questions. In doing so, it also forced her to dismantle a survivalist mindset she had carried throughout the majority of her life.
"I lived my whole life in survival," she admitted. "I had to stop and think, ‘Oh, this is what I really want.’ So, okay, I’m going to operate differently now."
Operating differently meant actively making room for personal desires that did not necessarily conform to the conventional timelines or traditional paths expected by society. That inherent tension is particularly palpable on tracks like "Mala Mia," a vibrant song about casting off the external expectations that tend to grow louder for women as they age.
"I really had to let go of those external expectations, like okay, I’m getting older, but at some point, I’m gonna have to stabilize and have a family. You know the normal cycle of life that people expect you to have, you know?" she said.
Those same external expectations heavily influenced how people viewed her artistic ambitions, particularly her foundational decision to write and perform her music in Spanish.
"Why don’t you sing in Italian and start from here?" she recalled loved ones asking when she was first launching her music career. "But I needed to be true to myself. And stay true to myself and sing in the language that felt best and most natural for me, and that was Spanish. I had to let go of the weight of these expectations that were put on me by external entities, and I also had to trust my ideas and trust my gut."
Trusting her gut ultimately meant making a decision that looked remarkably risky from the outside perspective: starting over entirely from scratch, not only by changing her geographic location but by fundamentally altering her career approach.
"My gut told me to start again. Start my career again from scratch, and I did. And leave Italy," she explained. "I didn’t really love that guy that I was with, so I didn’t want to stay comfortable there because I would end up being miserable if I were still in Italy, yearning for what could have been."
That immense willingness to choose uncertainty—leaving behind a romantic relationship and a country that raised her—became a foundational chapter of the album’s broader narrative. Yet, she is quick to note that recognizing her own progress was not always straightforward, especially when a cascading series of circumstances entirely outside of her control delayed the album’s long-awaited release.
"People from the outside are always going to think it took me four years to make the album. The album was made in a few months, and it’s been ready for two years," she pointed out. "For a year and a half it’s been ready. But in the meantime, I had a toxic manager, and I had to heal my vocal cords because I was completely burned out."
Compounding those personal and artistic hurdles, she faced a frustrating gauntlet of logistical roadblocks, ranging from immigration paperwork and production availability to complex contracts and label decisions.
"I had to wait six months for the visa," she detailed. "I had to wait six months for this executive producer to be available. I had to wait for the contract to be in place, and for the label to decide that, yes, they were on board. It’s so much."
If there is one definitive lesson Yendry says she has extracted from the creation of Como Agua, it is the vital importance of trusting her own creative instincts.
"I think I didn’t know how to trust my own ideas," she shared. "Before, I always felt like I wasn’t enough, or that I didn’t know enough. I always felt like someone else who has been in this industry for longer might know way more than me."
The rigorous process of making the album required her to actively challenge that conditioned instinct to defer to authority figures she once assumed knew better than she did. Instead, she began grounding her decisions in what felt inherently true to her artistic vision.
"And then I think with this album, something changed," she noted. "I switched, and I was like, ‘Oh, actually no one will know better than me how I feel and how I want to write things and how I want to present things because these are songs that I’m going to have to sing for the rest of my life.’"
This newfound trust extended far beyond the recording studio. Yendry took a deeply hands-on approach to the visual identity of the album, personally directing her own cover shoot and paying a photographer out of pocket after realizing that none of the pre-approved industry imagery captured her truth. Every minute decision she navigated forced her to confront and dismantle her lingering self-doubt.
All of these intersecting tensions—identity, migration, loneliness, ambition, societal expectations, self-doubt, and the ultimate reclamation of her own voice—converge within the album’s evocative title.
"I think it became my manifesto when I started. After the burnout, when I started healing, it became my manifesto in a way that I want to flow through life," Yendry reflected.
She is also quick to acknowledge that adopting the metaphor of water does not mean life has magically become effortless. Rather, it signifies that she has fundamentally transformed the way she moves through its challenges.
"Yes, I feel like things are coming to me," she said. "Not just because I’ve been working so hard, because in the past I worked hard too. But I feel like now I do it with a different grounding. Now I know who I am. I know what I like. I know what I don’t want. I know my boundaries. I know the people I don’t want in my life. It feels great to be honest. It feels amazing, and things flow that way. It doesn’t mean it’s easier, but it’s way more satisfying."
Ultimately, Como Agua represents a profound milestone for Yendry: the realization that she does not need to arrive at a single, definitive answer regarding who she is. Instead, she is entirely comfortable with the reality that she can continue evolving and changing at any given moment.
For an artist who spent years trying to decode where she belonged, the most radical part of her ongoing evolution is her refusal to settle on just one rigid definition. She can be a proud Dominicana while simultaneously embracing her Italian roots. She can belong to multiple distinct places while carrying the quiet weight of not fully belonging to any single one. She can craft music that defies genre categorization, change her mind about what she wants out of life, leave behind what no longer serves her, and choose to relocate whenever inspiration strikes—with cities like New York already lingering in her sights. Ultimately, all of these diverse versions of herself remain part of a cohesive, ongoing story. Like water, she is simply designed to keep moving.
