King Princess — the songwriter Mikaela Straus, now 20 — launched her recording career early last year with “1950,” a streaming hit that begins with a blunt statement about her sexual orientation: “I hate it when dudes try to chase me.” Then it delves into an infatuation — “tell me why my gods look like you” — while imagining the repressed 1950s, when homosexuality was expected to stay closeted.

The music had the same dual perspective, melding current and retro . King Princess is signed to Zelig, the label run by the producer Mark Ronson; she sang on his album, “Late Night Feelings,” and she shares his penchant for blurring past and present. In “1950,” subterranean bass throbs and digitally tweaked drums and backup vocals merge with the vintage warmth of hymnlike piano and reverb-heavy guitar chords, while the song’s structure could have come out of a 1960s pop factory like the Brill Building. King Princess, who describes herself as genderqueer and gay, placed her sexuality upfront — even more so on the songs that would join “1950” on her 2018 EP, “Made My Bed” — and exulted in the enduring power of desire and love.

She carries that approach — candid and forthright while grounded in past generations’ pop — onto her full-length debut album, “Cheap Queen.” She sings about self-doubt and self-confidence, passion and longing, connection and betrayal; barely out of her teens, she’s a young person sorting things out for herself, and human inconstancy isn’t bound by gender. While King Princess writes about 21st-century romance — one new track is “Watching My Phone” — the music places her songs on a longer timeline, full of ghosts from previous pop eras.

Image “Cheap Queen” is King Princess’s debut album on Mark Ronson’s imprint, Zelig.

In “Homegirl,” the singer is captivated by a woman who also draws male attention: “We’re friends at the party/I’ll give you my body at home,” she promises. The tune is a waltz, set in King Princess’s huskier lower range; strummed acoustic guitar and simulated vibraphone make the song hover and sway like K.D. Lang looking back to Patsy Cline. In “Prophet,” minor-key electric piano chords, distant chimes and a film-noir backbeat gently push King Princess’s breathy confession: “I can only think about you.”