ela minus releases her second album ‘DIA’
Ela Minus thought her second album, DIA, was finally done. For three years, she’d toted snippets of its songs around at least three countries—her native Colombia, her briefly adopted Mexico, and her series of rented apartments and long-stay hotel rooms across multiple American states. Her checklist of edits to make and layers to perfect had reached zero in California. She’d take a week off, she believed, and then track the last vocals in a little place overlooking the Puget Sound’s mountain-ringed sweep outside Seattle. Instead, that is where Minus realized she needed to rewrite many of the album’s lyrics, that they had again taken a backseat to her meticulous sound design and magnetizing song structures. She thought back to her charged 2020 debut, acts of rebellion, and recognized they hadn’t been honest enough, that they’d at best exposed her surface and not herself. This time around, she wanted to go deeper. The album ‘Dia’ is released today (january 17th) via domino.
DIA, then, is a rarified feat in electronic music, where cutting-edge production and space-shuddering sonics meet a burgeoning singer-songwriter’s real sense of self-reflection and private reckoning. Where acts of rebellion felt intentionally small, as if pounding inside the club with late-night reverie, DIA is both introspective and expansive, the wide sweep of its songs revealing more of Minus as person and producer than ever before. Witness the vertiginous menace of “IDK,” a bass-ravaged confessional of existential anxiety, or the pop splendor of “UPWARDS,” an unabashed and addictive theme song for safeguarding yourself, body and soul. “It’s a shame,” Minus sings during “IDOLS,” a brilliant bit of comeuppance for those high on their own supply of cruelty, “that it takes pain to know who we are.” Then she laughs and/or sighs, a very human and frank moment on an album that deals masterfully not only with that pain but any potential path out of it.
DIA is a record about becoming, from a process that entailed self-discovery at a deliberate pace to songs that seem to collectively ask where we go from here, long after we’ve been broken but long before we intend to be broken forever. “I want to be better,” Minus songs in the hook of the song of the same name, her voice a militant chirp pulling against a plunging bassline. “I thought I was better.” It is a song of romantic self-flagellation and endless aspiration, Minus seeing herself in the cruel context of other people and wishing for more. And then comes “ONWARDS,” three minutes of relentless beats and distorted circuitry that harken back to Minus’ hardcore teenage days back in Bogotá. “Now I am not afraid to say: I’m terrified I’ll fail,” she speak-sings before the song careens into an abyss of savage noise, only to spring back into action within seconds. How is that for honesty, for exposing your deepest worries? Opening the mountain, DIAmarks the next phase of Ela Minus’ career and life without declaring where any of it may or must go.
