Ela Minus

Today, Colombian artist Ela Minus announces her new album, DIA, out January 17, 2025 via Domino, and presents its new single/video “BROKEN.” Following her charged 2020 debut, acts of rebellion, Ela’s second album 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, a “breathtaking techno-pop debut” (Remezcla), 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 Ela as person and producer than ever before. 

After three years of toting snippets of songs around her native Colombia, her briefly adopted Mexico, and her series of rented apartments and hotel rooms across North America and Europe, Ela thought ​​DIA was finally complete. And then, she thought back to acts of rebellion and recognized her lyrics hadn’t been honest enough. They’d exposed her surface and not herself. This time, she wanted to go deeper.

She began by changing the setting—an outpost in California’s Mojave Desert, a month-long hotel and small studio stay in Los Angeles, forays back to New York, a Puget Sound-side vista near Seattle, Mexico City, and finally London, all places where time seemed to move at different speeds, not only inspiring the music to move with wide dynamic swings but also prompting her to consider what she had to play and say about her life so far. Late one night while working from a rented cabin in the mountains of Mexico, she stumbled upon a chord progression that she knew would launch the record. This is a long, luxuriant tone that rises above static snippets and squelchy sequences at the start of DIA opener “ABRIR MONTE.” Ela comments, “‘ABRIR MONTE’ is a phrase commonly used where I’m from, referring to the act of opening paths through dense foliage. I’ve always loved the poetry of it. That is what making this record felt like, opening new paths inward and outward, continuing to delve further through unexplored territory. 

Just as it does on record, today’s new single, “BROKEN,” soon unspooled from that same tone. With luminous synthesizers and intersecting layers of restless detail, it eventually opens into a four-on-the-floor insistence belying an anthem about admitting to suffering and then enduring it. Ela comments, “I started writing this thinking I was perfectly fine and finished writing knowing I was not.” “BROKEN” follows the previously released single, “COMBAT,” ​​DIA’s immersive and gorgeous closer about not giving up, of building it back, which is just what Ela set out to do when writing DIA.

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. Throughout the 10 songs, mixed by Marta Salogni and mastered by Heba Kadry, the same team behind acts of rebellion, Ela seems to saddle a line between worlds of pop accessibility and experimental aplomb, her incandescent and catchy choruses always surrounded by meticulous and imaginative sonics. Opening the mountain, DIA marks the next phase of Ela Minus’ career and life without declaring where any of it may or must go.

In support of her album, Ela will be joining Caribou on their 2025 EU/UK Tour, and will support Floating Points at the annual ADE Amsterdam Dance Event at the iconic Melkweg venue. This follows recent performances at Four Tet’s All Dayer, Field Day, Sónar, MUTEK, and Brooklyn’s Knockdown Center. This fall, Synth History is also launching an ongoing and in depth docu-series on Ela’s story and music. Preview the first episode here. Ela recently launched www.forthebirds.xyz, a platform where fans can write to Ela, and she writes back, covering personal and technical topics or whatever approach grabs her interest.