The club is traditionally the place where you can escape all the problems in your life and the world at large, but it’s where Ela Minus goes to confront them. On her 2020 full-length debut, acts of rebellion, the Colombian producer drew upon her eclectic musical CV—Bogotá hardcore kid, Berklee-trained jazz musician, techno convert, touring drummer for electro-goth queen Austra, professional synth builder—to make an album that channeled the communal joy of dance music and hedonistic allure of subterranean after-hours spaces into punky protest music. But if that record’s collection of misfit mantras and anti-capitalist critique transformed the dancefloor into a pulpit, Minus’ second album, DÍA, uses it more like a confession booth.
For Minus, the period surrounding acts of rebellion was one of both celebration and dislocation. Just before the album was released to international acclaim, Minus had to give up her Brooklyn apartment and recording space due to financial constraints during COVID lockdown. She’d spend the next few years bouncing between Bogotá, Mexico City, L.A., Seattle, New York, and London, desperate to find a new place that felt like home while feeling the pressure to capitalize on the career momentum sparked by her debut. By the time she was able to piece together a new album, she realized the songs weren’t speaking to her, prompting an 11th-hour rewrite that better reflected her unsettled state of mind. That extra time and attention pays off massively with DÍA, an album that pushes Minus’ musical vision outward while burrowing deeper inward lyrically. Like acts of rebellion, the album carves out a safe space for outsiders to harness strength in numbers, but trades in the DIY basement-club vibe for the open-air expanse of a festival field. And while it retains her debut’s insurrectionary edge, DÍA recognizes that self-care is a crucial first step toward building a better world for all.
Of course, the first step toward self-care is admitting that you need it. In DÍA’s opening minutes, Minus emerges from acts of rebellion’s nocturnal netherworld, capturing the sobering sensation of a sunrise hitting your face after a night spent dancing in the shadows. Musically, “Abrir Monte” picks up where the joyous second half of Jamie xx’s “Gosh” left off, with a low-end two-chord pattern serving as the backdrop for a cluster of synth starbursts, while flickering beats conjure a city gearing up for the morning rush. The track doubles as the extended intro to “Broken,” a cry for help that swells into a soul-purifying baptism-by-rave and seamlessly fuses Minus’ artful idiosyncrasies with emergent dance-pop ambitions. Call it “Fever Ray of Light.”
As “Broken” achieves liftoff, Minus issues a promise: “I’ll keep writing melodies/To sing away the gloom/That we have succumbed to.” For all the song’s optimistic energy, DÍA is not some blissfully idealistic paean to the healing properties of dance music. It’s a record about putting in the work and coming to terms with past traumas and behavior patterns as a means to harden the skin. It’s also a record where the line between self-criticism and nihilism occasionally starts to blur. While the synth-smeared “QQQQ” kicks into the sort of glow-stick-twirling thumper that could topple a Coachella dance tent, Minus’ Spanish-language lyrics undercut that euphoric energy with apocalyptic thoughts: “Si va a ser así/Que se acabe el mundo” (“If it’s going to be like this/Let the world end”). Most uncanny is Minus’ resigned, almost peaceful delivery.
But if DÍA occasionally conveys a sense of hopelessness, it’s determined to not surrender to it. On acts of rebellion, Minus’ voice often sounded on the verge of receding into the dry ice, but on DÍA, it’s a blunt and brash instrument, never more so than on “I Want to Be Better,” which is the closest that Minus has come to writing a love song—albeit one set in the aftermath of a relationship spat, yielding a plea for forgiveness where each hand-clapped house beat hits like a self-flaggeling strike. That song serves as the gateway to a second side that functions almost as a mini concept album charting Minus’ path to self-improvement. On an interconnected three-song suite—“Onwards,” “And,” “Upwards”—Minus seeks inner peace through industrialized aggression, and as the latter track approaches peak strobe-lit bacchanalia, Minus reiterates the impetus for DÍA: “I’d love to save you, but I’ve got to save myself first.”
If DÍA largely counters acts of rebellion with acts of rehabilitation, Minus leaves us with a promise to fight another day. The closing “Combat” is DÍA’s extreme outlier, both in its lustrous ambient swirl of synths and woodwinds, and in its revolutionary intent: Minus’ Spanish lyrics flip an old Alejandro Jodorowsky proverb—“Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness”—into a wake-up call to action. Minus recently launched a Q&A blog (à la Nick Cave’s Red Hand Files) called For the Birds, where she answers fan queries about everything from her synth settings to her life philosophies. Its appearance underscores the fact that, after a long period of nomadic upheaval and intense self-reflection, Minus is ready to reconnect with the world. Though DÍA is deeply personal, its intent is to inspire trapped birds everywhere to start flapping their wings.
