A small signpost prompts Laetitia Tamko to find out her “plant personality,” and she obliges. Pulling out her iPhone, she scans a QR code and, eight questions later, is staring at a photo of a flower that looks like a frosted pinecone. As it turns out, Tamko is an ice blue calathea, or Calathea burle-marxii. According to the New York Botanical Garden—or, at least, their digital media team—that means that she’s a wallflower. “‘You recognize the importance of alone time and occasionally sequestering yourself from the outside world,’” Tamko reads aloud from her screen, laughing self-consciously. “Pretty spot on.”

On this June afternoon, the 26-year-old singer-songwriter who performs as Vagabon has just begun to emerge from a period of self-imposed seclusion. Strolling through a conservatory in this sprawling Bronx oasis, she gives the impression of someone who was recently awakened and is slowly acclimating to the outside world. Tamko has been off tour for almost a year now, finishing up work on her self-titled sophomore album. It’s the follow-up to 2017’s Infinite Worlds, a collection of homey guitar tunes that swung between elegance and chaos. The debut showcased Tamko’s deeply resonant inquiries about taking up space and searching for community, launching her from humble DIY venues to stages around the world.

But if not for the through line of Tamko’s singular, warbly voice—which, even as she gains skill and experience, retains the rawness of someone who has just discovered that she has lungs—it wouldn’t be immediately obvious that her two albums share a creator. Where Infinite Worlds leaned on conventional rock instrumentation, Vagabon is lusher, neater, and made predominantly of digital sounds. This was largely a result of scarcity: Tamko did much of her writing on the road, where the available resources were limited to her computer and herself. She describes the process as intensely isolating, an experience mirrored by the internal bent of the album’s lyrics. Tamko is still adjusting to the fact that now, as she prepares for the record’s fall release, she’s no longer her only stakeholder.

Tamko has never been to this particular botanical garden before, despite having lived in nearby Yonkers, New York, as a teenager. The current exhibition honors the life and work of the Brazilian landscape artist Roberto Burle Marx—the namesake of Tamko’s purported spirit flower, about whom she learned during a recent trip to São Paulo—with a monumental display of bromeliad plants and bossa nova music. The sky had split open just moments after we met up in Brooklyn, where Tamko lives, that morning, and the rain continues through the afternoon—bad news for garden-viewing, but good news for privacy. We walk laps around a steamy conservatory in relative solitude, snapping photos of hanging staghorn ferns and vivid, scarlet torch ginger. The only other people there are staff and a couple of retirement-age women. One friendly employee who’s seen us circling approaches to ask if we need help finding an exit.

Tamko speaks in the same way that she often sings: with soft, magnetic intensity. Throughout the day, I notice myself lowering my own voice to match hers. The quietness comes from years of being told she was intimidating—feedback she responded to, she says, by making herself as tiny and docile as possible. That sense of diminution was central to Infinite Worlds. “I feel so small,” she sings right at the top of the album’s first song, “My feet can barely touch the floor.” But contorting herself to meet people’s wayward desires is exhausting, and lately she’s trying to be less accommodating. “Every year, you find something else you don’t give a shit about anymore,” she offers, shruggingly, by way of explanation.

It’s an ongoing effort that surfaces on the new album. When Tamko intones, “I know that I was gone a lot last year/But I hoped that you’d still be here,” on a song called “In a Bind,” it sounds like a timid expression of utter betrayal. Elsewhere, she sings about personal dilution on “Water Me Down,” but rather than sounding defeated, the song—with its chipper synth line and danceable beat—is resolute and collected. So is the album’s opener, which talks about feeling good instead of feeling small. Tamko’s newfound self-assurance is on view on the record’s cover, where she is resplendent, working her angles in a striking, hexagonal hat. And one of the album’s most memorable lyrics is an eloquent statement of autonomy: “We reserve the right to be full/When we’re on our own.”