In 2014, Laetitia Tamko, who records as Vagabon, released an EP called “Persian Garden.” Her singing was fitful and jagged, soaring one moment and sighing the next, all of it matching the flickers and moans of her electric guitar. She measured out small helpings of her transcendent voice, rather than showing it off all at once. The album ended with a song called “Sharks,” which she rerecorded and released under the name “The Embers” a few years later. “I feel so small,” she sings over a meek guitar line, sounding resigned but not despondent. “My feet can barely touch the floor / On the bus, where everybody is tall.” But then the band crashes in, and her voice surges from a shy whisper to a wailing laugh. “Run and tell everybody / Run and tell everybody that Laetitia is / A small fish,” she cries out, delicately leaning into the syllables of her own name and stretching out the word “is” as though her whole being depended on it. She basks in being the “small fish.” “You’re a shark that hates everything,” she sings, breaking into a teasing giggle.

When I first heard her say her own name, I felt chills. I couldn’t remember hearing a singer do that in a way that felt tentative and even a bit hopeful, rather than bold and boastful, like it was just branding. It was as if she were reminding herself that these songs were primarily for and about her—that she needed them more than we did. Throughout “Persian Garden” and “Infinite Worlds,” her full-length album from 2017, there is a playful hesitancy to her singing, and to the way that her snarling electric guitar takes up the lines that she leaves unresolved. The songs feel deliberate, like she wants to enter into the world at her own pace. She is the protagonist of her own story.

It’s remarkable that Tamko, who is twenty-six, makes such uninhibited music, given the secrecy that surrounded her artistic evolution. She was born and raised in Cameroon, and her family moved to the United States when she was in her teens. At the time, she didn’t speak English. After a spell in Harlem, the family settled in Yonkers. When she was in high school, her parents bought her a guitar from Costco. She figured that it was an easy and quiet enough instrument to teach herself, and she did, watching tutorials on DVD. But the idea of being a proper musician seemed impossibly far away. Her sense of the world then was that you were either Beyoncé or someone messing around in your bedroom, and that there was nothing in between. While in college, however, she found kindred spirits in a small D.I.Y.-rock scene in Brooklyn. At home, she played the part of a model student, but the late nights supposedly spent at the library were actually spent at rehearsals with her band. Her first performance—at the Silent Barn, an event space in Bushwick—was also her first concert. Until the release of “Persian Garden,” Tamko’s parents didn’t know that she was a professional musician.

Tamko found an audience among enthusiasts of intimate, often home-recorded pop, drawing comparisons to artists like Frankie Cosmos and Mitski, who make up something like a circuit of outsiders. People are drawn to these musicians’ imperfections and emotional rawness—seeing someone who is comfortable with discomfort can be life-changing. Music has always been a fickle, unpredictable career path, yet the distance between writing a song, or making a beat, and finding faraway admirers has been radically compressed. Increasingly, the challenge isn’t just in getting your art out there but in dealing with the logistics: being homesick, eating well on the road, and negotiating the projections and scrutiny of others. Perhaps you’ve captured in words something others can only feel or sense. But you’re still the same work in progress, splitting time between careers, uncertain of what to do now that you’re in a state-of-the-art recording studio.

This sudden immersion has become part of Tamko’s narrative. She left her job as a computer engineer and went on tour to promote “Infinite Worlds,” which included many of the first songs she had written. But she began experimenting with music that strayed from the guitar-driven indie she was known for. She composed and self-produced her new album, “Vagabon,” largely while she was on the road. Where her previous songs boomed and crashed, her new songs wobble and glow. Many of them mix the raw materials of R. & B. and dance tunes, producing something a bit quieter.

There’s a familiar earnestness to a singer cradling a guitar, a ready-made aesthetic of mopey vulnerability. But a person trying to conjure an orchestra using a laptop can appear even more solitary. “Even if I run from / it I’m still in it,” Tamko sings on “Flood,” striding through the song’s ambient sounds and thunderous drums. Every now and then, a glimmer of what a song might have sounded like in a previous iteration of Vagabon peeks through. “Secret Medicine” is built on muted synths and digitized finger snaps: “I know I’m a mess / I change my mind then I’m / back at it again.” These layers begin to dissipate, until she’s just strumming again, admiring that the heart can “mend all alone.”

“Vagabon” chronicles a life enriched, and made complicated, by stepping into new contexts. On the desolate “In a Bind,” Tamko sings, “I know that I was gone / a lot last year / But I hoped you’d still / be here, uh-huh.” An apology or explanation dissolves into a line of “mm,” “huh,” and “yes,” which, in the end, are the most articulate expressions of heartache. Her songs often leave you with the sense that she’s encircling something that she can’t quite reach. Her singing offers structure to textures that are ethereal, moody, and ever-shifting. Sometimes her vocals and her productions seem at odds with each other. “Please Don’t Leave the Table” proceeds over a soft gurgle of a beat and an enchanting, seesawing synth line. Tamko sings softly, with a kind of clarity that evades her elsewhere, repeating the song’s title in different ways, emphasizing different words, hopeful that some combination will work: “Please don’t leave the table / I’m still eating.” But the beat continues, an unforgiving metronome tracking someone else’s rhythm, and you get the feeling that it’s all just beyond her control.

“Vagabon” begins and ends with “Full Moon in Gemini.” Tamko sings about bodies lying under the moon, and she elongates her syllables and lines, like they’re blankets she’s trying to drape over a lover. She invokes scenes of “driving through Arcata / Past the Mad River and the mountains I wrote this about.” She pulls you out from inside the song, much like when she says her own name, in “The Embers.” A specific shade of sky, the angle of the mountains through a car window: the song is her evidence that this moment happened. Pop songs are often about our place in the world; the listener dreams of being somewhere or somebody else. Yet, in Tamko’s songs, we are witnesses as she figures things out for herself.

Part of this dynamic is a result of her sudden visibility as a black woman emerging from an indie-rock community defined largely by the tastes and emotional registers of white fans. Familiar notions of alienation or disaffection, recognition or pride, might seem a little different to the daughter of immigrants. And, even in a community of outsiders, everyone’s highs and lows don’t emanate from the same sources. “Wits About You” slowly builds from a heartbeat and churning synths. Just as the chorus trembles to life, the song cuts out, leaving Tamko singing coolly over a piano, “I was invited to the party / They won’t let my people in / Well then never mind / never mind, never mind / We don’t wanna go to your function.”