A Debut From a Kissimmee Bedroom That Sounds Like a Third Album

The record, which is the debut of a twenty-two-year-old singer named Elena Ríos who records under the name juno., arrives with the peculiar quality of a first album that already knows too much. It was recorded, over the course of two years, in a bedroom in Kissimmee. It was leaked, in pieces, on SoundCloud, where it accumulated the sort of mythology that most artists spend a career trying to earn.

The result is a debut that sounds like a third album — self-aware, faintly weary, and, in its best moments, unwilling to give the audience what the audience thought it wanted. The single, 'Route Four,' is a five-minute meditation on a bus route that no longer exists. It is very good. It is also, I suspect, the least representative song on the record.

What the record is really about, if it is about anything, is what it costs to become known before you have finished becoming a person. juno., who declined to be interviewed for this review, has already, at twenty-two, released the kind of album most artists don't make until they are forty. I do not know what she will do next. I am not sure she does either.