Music
Ela Minus
Dia
Domino Recording Company
Street: 01.17.25
Ela Minus = Kelly Lee Owens + Angelo Badalamenti + Kraftwerk
Ela Minus’ new album Dia is a straight up dazzler. Minus drifts from atmospheric modern electronica to Pound! Pound! Pound! familiar club beats, and back again. With plenty of record scratches, feedback, fuzz and static scattered all over the place. Dia sounds modern and old with a perfect spacial balance and a precision that’s hard to ignore.
Minus stacks all these synth sounds up like large multi-colored Lego blocks, creating her own space, her own house, her own world. Minus delivers a vibrant, futuristic and cosmic soundtrack for the late night club hounds and the broken people who never leave the house.
Minus sings on the opening track “Broken”: “I’m on my knees / haven’t found a faith / Here I am again / Bending everything till it breaks.” The track is an open-hearted confessional. To be broken is to be pulled apart, and Minus bleeds out everywhere. The track plays out with simple, steady drum beats and repeated synth lines that propel the track forward like a runaway train. Spoiler Alert: Minus never touches the breaks. She hurtles into the next track “Idols,” where she begins to transform. “All it took was a little blood / To see what I’m really made of / It’s a shame / That it takes pain / To know who we are,” Minus sings with confidence and a declaration that she has arrived.
The back end of the record has a set of consecutive tracks that shows Minus as a phoenix. On the first track “Onwards,” Minus sings: “Come sit and watch it burn / Hope with flames comes rebirth / But I won’t hold my breath.” On “And,” Minus sings in her native Colombian tongue: “No se trata de mi y lo entiendo darte paz vamos a apagar esto,” which roughly translates to: “It’s not me, and I understand it, give you peace, let’s turn this off.” Minus turns her old self off like a light switch.
The final consecutive track is “Upwards,” where Minus arrives with a new kind of confidence. The track takes off with an addictive synth hook that does not let up and Minus makes sure to hammer everything down. “I’d love to save you / But you’ve got to save yourself / I’d love to save you / But I’ve got to save myself first.” Onwards And Upwards, Minus delivers personal liberation you can dance to. The album ends with “Combat,” in which Minus repeats: “de no parar hasta guemarlo,” which translates to: “Not stopping until it burns.” With the fire, the phoenix rises.
Minus has a little bit of Tori Amos’ angst mixed with Björk‘s otherworldly ‘90s funhouse approach and a slight hint of Blackout-era Britney Spears reinvention. But this is 2025. Minus is her own pop star, ascending at the quarter point of the 21st century. In a month where FKA Twigs dropped her masterful, majestic, super futuristic album EUSEXUA, Ela Minus proves she’s right there with her with Dia.
Dia is a record that packs a punch, but flies on by. When the record ends, the immediate and lonely silence feels heavy because you are left wanting more. And that’s a good thing. It proves that Ela Minus has got your attention. The future is here, let everything else burn. —Russ Holsten
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Review: Geordie Greep — The New Sound