Yendry Is the Limitless Pop Star of Tomorrow

In her new video for “YA,” Yendry climbs a mountain near the Cauca River in Medellín, Colombia, surrounded by verdant hills that bleed into evanescent clouds. She is alone in this landscape, commanding our line of sight across the jungle’s expanse. Wearing a long-sleeve crop top and a matching black-and-white fringe skirt, a serpentine braid sprouting from the top of her head like a yucca plant, she reaches the crest of the mountain, looks into the camera, and announces, “Yo quiero to’.” I want it all.

Yendry may want it all, but there is a quiet elegance to her ambition. In May, the 27-year-old Zooms in from her high school bedroom in Turin, Italy, which boasts the kind of eclectic decor that characterizes an outgrown childhood space: The walls are painted crimson and covered in curling Henri Matisse prints, illustrations of characters from The Royal Tenenbaums, and stickers of Italian football players that her younger brother stuck on the door since he moved in. Yendry is serene; she hums a melody as she gets settled, sitting in an emerald cardigan, vintage black jeans, chunky gold hoops, and two slender gold chains.

It’s drizzling in Turin. At one point during our chat, which is both in Spanish and English, Yendry walks out to the backyard. It’s dotted with muddy, coffee-colored puddles. A few of her mother’s seven dogs are frolicking around in the mist, grinning goofily as the water drenches them. “Come here, girl!” Yendry calls out in Spanish, tenderly petting one of the pups after it trots over.

Yendry has spent the better part of the last year working on her debut album in Latin America and in Miami, where she recently moved. She has five solo singles to her name thus far, and they all showcase her artful, slow-burning elegance. Her songs are delicate deconstructions of pop, R&B, reggaeton, flamenco, and beyond. No matter what genre she’s working with, or what she’s singing about—self-confidence, domestic abuse, failed relationships—Yendry exudes a coy playfulness and an untouchable aplomb. Listeners and fellow artists are taking notice—several of her videos have collected more than a million views, and over the past few months she’s posted Instagram photos in the studio with titans like Damian Marley and Afrobeats mainstay DJ Spinall.

She only recently returned to Italy, after her grandfather’s passing. She’s spent this time consoling her family, especially her grandmother, who slept in the same bed as her husband for 61 years. “We make her laugh; we make all her thinking about it pass,” Yendry says. “Sometimes, it still gets to her a little, but that’s normal.”

Yendry arrived in Turin when she was 4 years old. She was born in Santo Domingo and grew up in a small municipality on the outskirts of the city, surrounded by the Dominican Republic’s characteristic and colorful concrete homes, street vendors, and viejitos playing dominoes on the corner. When she was a baby, Yendry’s mother plucked feathers off chickens for a living, while her grandmother took care of her at home.

Yendry’s mother soon moved to Italy in search of better job opportunities but left her daughter behind. “She actually was like, ‘Hey, Mama is going. I’ll see you tonight,’ and then she left for one year,” Yendry chuckles. “That woman is not easy.” During those 12 months, Yendry fell ill. She had unexplainable fevers and a meager appetite. Her grandmother took her to doctors and spiritual healers to find out what was going on, but there didn’t seem to be anything physically wrong with her. “I think it was because of my mom,” she remembers. “I was too little to think about it as trauma.” Trauma is a topic that Yendry navigates with radical openness and honesty—a reserved wisdom that so many diaspora kids are forced to acquire.

When Yendry moved to Italy, she picked up the language quickly. Her mother eventually met and married a man named Mario, whom Yendry calls her father. But like any immigrant battling the machine of their new home’s dominant culture, the experience was sometimes painful and suffocating. Yendry, who identifies as Afro-Latina, faced the obligatory racist insults from kids in middle school. “They were like, ‘Hey, Black girl, clean my shoes,’” she remembers, adding that she didn’t feel like she could speak up about such discrimination at the time. She asked her mom how to lighten her skin and straighten her hair so she could look more like her white Italian friends. “I didn’t wanna deal with my Dominican roots ’cause I needed to survive here.”

We are often expected to survive and overcome the traumas that break us, to triumph over our demons and become whole again. But Yendry’s music suggests that healing is elusive and incomplete, often the labor of a lifetime. These are themes that she meditates on in her art, especially as she has returned to her Dominican roots and childhood experiences for inspiration. On “Nena,” Yendry assumes the role of a parent sending a prayer to the child she’s left behind, tormented by the formative moments of motherhood she’s missing as a consequence of the distance. Over a tip-toeing bassline and sparse percussion, she purrs, “Le pido al cielo que te dé mi amor… son las estrellas la’ que te aconsejan” (“I ask the heavens to give you my love… the stars are the ones that guide you”).

Yendry has spent her life learning how to make songs like “Nena”—how to gather the fragments of her Caribbean and European roots and reassemble them into living, breathing counternarratives. Along the way, she gathered influences from the English-language pop stars she grew up watching on MTV. In fact, the first words Yendry learned in English were from Rihanna and Beyoncé songs: As a teen in the late 2000s, Yendry would pay a couple of Euros for internet access at money transfer shops, where she’d print out the lyrics to tracks from Good Girl Gone Bad or I Am… Sasha Fierce. “I used to spend my afternoons just translating, with the dictionary,” she laughs. “It was a really long job.”

But she was also exposed to Dominican music. Her mom would take her to barbecues soundtracked by bachata and merengue, classic artists like Yoskar Sarante and Juan Luis Guerra. And there was Italian music, of course. In the summers, her family traveled to Puglia, the southern region that forms the heel of Italy’s boot. On these 12-hour trips to the sea, her grandparents would play kitsch Neapolitan icons like Nino D’Angelo and Gigi D’Alessio. “Italian music is super melodic,” she says. “They’re super dramatic as well. Super dramatic!”

Yendry began singing casually with her friends at school when she was around 15, but never performed in front of an audience until she became a contestant on the Italian version of X Factor in 2012, an experience she now describes as “50 percent bad, 50 percent good.” It taught her how to be on stage, but also how the industry is a business involving marketing and entertainment, not just music. “I had my taste in music, and they didn’t really get it,” she says. “I was listening to Massive Attack and Lana Del Rey, and they got me singing Dionne Warwick—which is good, but it was not really me. Also it’s like, ‘Of course you got the Black girl on TV singing Black music.’”

She appeared on X Factor for five weeks, and after she was eliminated, Yendry surged to fame in Italy. “When I came out of it, I stayed in my house for one month and didn’t want to talk to anyone,” she says. She could no longer go out with her friends without being stopped on the street. “I didn’t like that because I was not ready. I was 18 years old; I just wanted to go to university and have a real job.”

She ended up studying philosophy for a year at the University of Turin, while working part-time jobs to pay the bills. She was driven to philosophy in part because of the racism she’d experienced as a young girl. “This thing created something in me that made me feel like I had to prove that I was intelligent,” she says. But she was also drawn to it because she wanted to learn how to develop a critical framework. “I’m a curious person, and philosophy gave me the opportunity to ask myself questions.”

That curiosity is evident in the first musical projects Yendry took on post-X Factor: an electro-pop group and a manouche jazz band. It was with the jazz group that Yendry realized she wanted to sing in Spanish. Before then, she had never felt comfortable performing in the language, a vestige of racist micro- and macroaggressions, but also of the all-too-familiar battles that bicultural kids face when it comes to language. “You don’t really feel comfortable because you are in between, and you don’t really know if you’re going to be accepted,” she says. But something shifted when she sang a traditional Peruvian vals in front of an audience for the first time. Yendry realized she had to recreate this feeling in her music moving forward. “My voice sounds different,” she recalls of the performance. “It feels like it’s coming from another place.”

Yendry: She told me that that year of her life was the worst. She spent Christmas alone. She knew that she was doing the right thing, but when you are alone in a house and it’s cold, and you are coming from a different culture, and the neighbors don’t really care about you, she felt like, “Am I doing the right thing?” Sometimes a lot of [parents who have been through that] feel abandoned. Which they are not. But it just feels like that. She had to change her whole world. She left friends, family, culture, everything. I realized that I never thought about her point of view, you know? I’ve always thought about myself.

She cried because she really wanted me to sing in Spanish for a long time, and I was like, “No, Ma, I’m not gonna sing in Spanish!” So when she heard it, she was over the moon.

That’s a hard question! I feel like a Latin artist, but I also feel like a global artist. If I don’t see it that way, then all the sacrifices I’m making right now don’t make sense. Everything I’m investing in it, financially, in terms of time. I’m living in another country and I don’t have a house. I’m staying in hotels, [fighting] against COVID, and trying to be in the right place at the right time to catch opportunities.

I’m not just doing Latin music. I have influences from a lot of other stuff. If I take a salsa rhythm or a bachata rhythm, I still wanna feel free to sing in English on it, because I know English. I still wanna feel free to put a synthesizer on it because I love synthesizers. I don’t really want to put limits on my project.

Also it’s like, do we call American artists “English-speaking” artists? To me that says it all—that we need a label to define ourselves. I don’t want to put labels on myself, but I also understand that I need to somehow sell my music.

Because I grew up in a Dominican family, I faced those problems personally, on different sides. I’ve had arguments with my family about saying stuff like, “Oh finally, we have a white president!” It’s like, “OK! Let’s start from the root! Why are you saying this?” And they’re like, “I don’t know.” It’s a lack of information and it’s something that’s so in the culture that they don’t really think about it. With my family, I always try to have these conversations at the table. I feel like it’s my responsibility. But that’s a really, really long conversation. It’s everywhere.

I really want it to be not only one genre. I want to take a Juan Luis Guerra cover and make it electronic. I want to take salsa and give it a twist—use some synthesizers and different kicks and rhythms. I want to one day be able to play on a big stage and have an Aphex Twin-type song and then sing a ’60s Italian song and put it together as my own thing. What I’m trying to do is really hard! It takes time and it takes experimenting. You try and you try and try until you hear something that’s new and tasteful to you. The only thing that you can do is try to make what for you is really good music. That’s it.