“Abrir Monte,” the opening track of Ela Minus’ sophomore album DIA, comes from childhood. Translating to “open the mountains,” the phrase references the process of cutting through jungle undergrowth to create a new path. Those words stuck with a young Gabriela Jimeno during a youth in Colombia, and they returned to her in her thirties, during the long and searching gestation of DIA. Ela Minus, too, was cutting through murk and mist to reach somewhere else. The phrase and its accompanying music — a curtain-rise instrumental of aqueous synth drones — provide as evocative a reintroduction as one could ask for. For a moment, Jimeno looks all the way to origins and turns deeply inward, but towards the end of once more reinventing herself on DIA.
Ela Minus’ debut LP Acts Of Rebellion arrived in October of 2020 and was inextricable from its circumstances — a year of pandemic and dread, of protests and fragile hope. An intimate document blending confessions with seething calls to action, Acts Of Rebellion was built on shadowy synths and Jimeno’s hisses and whispers. Like many of us who found ourselves on the other side of 30 as the pandemic waned, Jimeno spent the small eternity of the next few years figuring out what the hell she actually wanted to be or say. Accordingly, it took a long time to find her way to the dawn of DIA.
Having scrawled “Change the process, you can change the result” in her notebooks, Jimeno embarked on three years of temporary lives. She began conceiving DIA in the desert of northern Mexico in late 2022; stints in her native Colombia, the Mojave Desert, Los Angeles, New York, Seattle, Mexico City, and London followed. Educated in musical synthesis and once holding down a day job building synths, Jimeno has always been both a technical and emotional writer. Fragments of songs cohered not just from experimenting, coaxing the most transfixing sounds from her beloved machines, but also from slowly pulling visions out of the ether. She thought she was done, then went back and rewrote all the lyrics, aiming for a more honest interrogation of everything going on in her head and soul.
As a result, DIA might extend from the prompt of Ela Minus’ earlier releases — a strain of singer-songwriter techno — but expands her music from claustrophobic club catharsis to broad, vibrant vistas. Acts Of Rebellion was already a bracing opening salvo, earning Jimeno an Artist To Watch nod in the fall of 2020. But everything about DIA betters its predecessor, becoming a portrait of an artist right in the midst of evolution.
To get there, Jimeno gets vulnerable, navigating moments of defeat, of ongoing confusion dogging a person at the age where, one once believed, things would’ve started to make sense. After “Abrir Monte,” “Broken” starts to come into focus, and Jimeno sings the first words of the album: “Mother, I’ve been a fool/ I let them in/ Even when you said not to listen/ Went to hell and back/ Laughed all the way/ Now I’m broken.” Initially, Jimeno intones the lyrics over ambience, wisps left over from “Abrir Monte.” But soon the song blooms, and her voice peels skyward over cascades of glistening synths. Gone are the subterranean spaces and greyscale flickers of the Ela Minus we once knew. Everything becomes more dexterous, dynamic, ebullient. You can hear the screen flood with color in real time.
DIA is not without its darker moments musically, like the festering layers of “Idols,” the melted and corroded pleas of “IDK,” or the snarl of “Onwards,” providing Jimeno’s latest electronic update on her teenage roots in Bogotá punk bands. Yet while Ela Minus’ previous work often felt like a reflection of an ever-increasingly tenuous world, many of DIA’s songs do the work of dreaming up a new one in response. Like “Broken,” “QQQQ” begins wracked on Earth before steadily ascending to the clouds in search of revelation. “I Want To Be Better” highlights Jimeno’s ability to be nakedly human while also conjuring the otherworldly; it finds her wracked with relationship failures while surrounded by synth lines that sound like bird calls in an alien planet’s rainforests. “Upwards” strikes a similar balance, the swooping chaos of synths talking over each other reflecting Jimeno’s repetition of “My mind keeps lying to me.” Though the song sounds like human and machine alike breaking down, it’s another instance where the optimistic direction of its title proves tangible.
A dance between devastation and renewal plays out across DIA. If Acts Of Rebellion often characterized and espoused political revolt as even the minute decisions we make every day while living in broken and oppressive systems, DIA is instead a vision of potential rebirth amidst total collapse — its array of celestial synths a sort of divine conflagration allowing a person to restart from scratch. “If it’s going to be like this, let the world end,” Jimeno sings in “QQQQ.” Yet rather than defeat, Jimeno seems to locate some kind of hope in the world, or ourselves, ceasing to be the versions we recognize. “Last night was the last night of that life where I pretend that I don’t care,” she sings in “Onwards. “‘I don’t have dreams so I can’t fail’/ Now I am not afraid to say/ I’m terrified I’ll fail.”
For the artist who once threatened, “You won’t make us stop,” over the visceral pulse of “megapunk,” maybe it seems like Jimeno has given in — ceded to the idea that things don’t work out, that we don’t grow and change and learn. But in “Upwards,” she offers perhaps the final word on DIA’s worldview. Taking the proverb that caged birds consider flight a “sickness,” she turns it on its head: “We are birds that only know life in a cage/ And nothing scares us,” before adding “As the walls move closer in, the desire to knock them down gets stronger… Keep going until it’s all burned down.”
DIA arose from years just as fraught as, and perhaps more quietly tumultuous than, those that surrounded the beginning of Ela Minus. This time, Jimeno greets the world head-on, transmitting from far-flung corners of the globe, wielding a transporting chorus and a mesmerizing synth that together become the sound of a cleansing purge. DIA still emerges from nocturnal spaces and long anxious sojourns, but it captures the other side of night — when the horizon glows with the radiance of another sunrise and, with it, new possibilities.
DIA is out 1/17 via Domino.
Other albums of note out this week:
• The Weather Station’s Humanhood
• Mac Miller’s posthumous Balloonerism
• Ex-Vöid’s In Love Again
• Prism Shores’ Out From Underneath
• ZORA’s BELLAdonna
• lots of hands’ into a pretty room
• Rufus Wainwright’s Dream Requiem
• Busta Rhymes’ Dragon Season… The Awakening
• jasmine.4.t’s You Are The Morning
• David Gray’s Dear Life
• Bloc Party frontman Kele’s The Singing Winds Pt. 3
• Brian John McBrearty’s Remembering Repeating
• Rebecca Black’s SALVATION
• Songhoy Blues’ Héritage
• Flora Hibberd’s Swirl
• Victoria Canal’s Slowly, It Dawns
• Sophie Jamieson’s I still want to share
• Rose Gray’s Louder, Please
• Delivery’s Force Majeure
• Wafia’s Promised Land
• Blue Lake’s Weft Mini Album
• some fear’s some fear
• Metal Bubble Trio’s Cucumber
• Slinky Vagabond’s The Eternal Return
• Echos’ QUIET, IN YOUR SERVICE
• Willow Avalon’s Southern Belle Raisin’ Hell
• A. Blomqvist’s Pohjola
• Amayo’s Lion Awakes
• Necrodeath’s Arimortis
• Ambrose Akinmusire’s honey from a winter stone
• Lanco’s We’re Gonna Make It
• Dear Seattle’s Toy
• Pigeon Pit’s Crazy Arms
• GFRIEND’s Season Of Memories
• Melissa Mary Ahern’s Kerosene
• Steve Hackett’s Live Magic At Trading Boundaries
• Fabienne Ambuehl’s Thrive
• Erik Jekabson’s Breakthrough
• Sarcator’s Swarming Angels & Flies
• Eidola’s Mend
• Tokyo Blade’s Time Is the Fire
• Grave Digger’s Bone Collector
• Cassio Vianna’s Vida
• Kieran Gunter’s Gaudi
• CKRAFT’s Uncommon Grounds
• Lanco’s We’re Gonna Make It
• Kyles Tolone’s Youth
• The New Mourning’s Songs Of Confusion
• Neil Young’s Neil Young (Mono Edition)
• Television Personalities’ Tune In, Turn On, Drop Out – Radio Sessions 1980-1993
• Buckcherry’s 15 (20th Anniversary Deluxe Edition)
• Son Lux’s Risk Of Make Believe EP
• Niambi’s Taboo EP
• ELLUR’s God Help Me Now EP
• Shutdown’s By Your Side EP
• Melissa Weikart’s Easy EP
• vHuxlii’s Odds And Ends, But Mostly Ends EP
• Paul Prier’s Panic Peaks EP
• Skiifall’s Lovers Til I’m Gone EP
• Milk & Bone’s Baby Dreamer EP
• chlothegod’s I Feel Different Every Day EP
• BØRNS’ Honeybee EP
