Ela Minus thought her second album, DÍA, 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.

DÍA, 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, DÍA 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.

Minus became a musician when she was nine, serving as the emphatic drummer in a series of Bogotá rock bands that practiced religiously and toured heavily. She subsequently split for the Berklee College of Music and then slipped just south, making synthesizers and electronic music in New York. (You can hear evidence of that innovative tenure throughout DÍA in the pocket pianos she helped create for Critter & Guitari, plus the ultra-rare Septavox synth made for Jack White.) She steadily pursued the sounds she’d heard in her head since childhood, synths and sequencers and the new space of being a solo artist getting her closer to it than she’d ever been. And then, her career escalated quickly, a series of self-released EPs netting the surprise Domino deal that led first to acts of rebellion and now DÍA.

However exciting it had been, that whirlwind had not given Minus many opportunities to step back and wonder what she wanted from music, or how she now related to it. The starts and stops prompted by a pandemic, however, gave her room to reconsider who she was and how she worked. Despite her music’s volume and raDÍAnce, she was actually a quiet introvert who craved space and time to compose in solitude. She accepted she was a lifelong fixer, too, always trying to amend imperfect situations without accepting them as a normal element of existence. “Change the process,” she scribbled in her notebooks more than once, “you change the result.”

She began by changing the setting, renting a little window-walled cube amid the mountainous high desert of northern Mexico in December 2022. Working at night and sleeping during the day, she stumbled upon a chord progression that she knew would launch the record. That’s the long, luxuriant tone you hear rise above static snippets and squelchy sequences at the start of “ABRIR MONTE”—“open the mountains,” a phrase she’d loved as a child when people would reference cutting a path through dense jungle undergrowth. After so many false beginnings, that’s how Minus now felt, having found a fresh trail through the always-endless possibilities of what comes next. Just as it does on record, “BROKEN” soon unspooled from that sound, too, its phosphorescent keyboards, intersecting layers of restless detail, and eventual four-on-the-floor insistence belying an anthem about admitting to suffering and then enduring it, anyway.

The settings kept changing—an outpost in California’s Mojave Desert, a month-long hotel stay and small studio in Los Angeles, a foray back in New York, that sound-side vista near Seattle, a return to Mexico City (where Minus sang those rewritten songs), and a final two-month foray to London to finish at last. These were 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. The disappointments and joys, investment and detachment all swept into these songs with candor, gravity, and the first shoots of wisdom.

Throughout these 10 songs, Minus seems to saddle a line between worlds of pop accessibility and experimental aplomb, her incandescent choruses always surrounded by meticulous and imaginative sonics. “UPWARDS” is unforgettable on first listen, for instance, its unrelenting pulse and sharp refrain about saving your own life setting the hook and then driving it in deep. But the synths that counter the beat are so aggressive and busy, like lasers waging a war against the song itself.

And there’s the way that the immersive and gorgeous closer “COMBAT” feels like a symphony of one, with celestial drones and seraphic bells evoking both classic Kompakt and New Age revivalism. “Los pájaros nacidos en jaula/no le tenemos miedo a nada,” she sings at the start, referencing a popular proverb about how birds born in a cage soon consider flying a sickness. But Minus turns that phrase on its head, declaring that, in her view, those birds aren’t actually afraid of anything. To wit, Minus focused on vocals like never before for DÍA, so evident during “COMBAT.” Her soft voice moves through these long tones with a balletic grace. She sings of resistance in perfectly rhythmic Spanish, her words implying a meter that doesn’t really exist. It is the sweeping, lighters-up finale, the comedown of an album loaded with but not weighed down by heavy questions. Where the throbbing and mighty “QQQQ” (pronounced “q”) is her dance track for the end of the world, for welcoming its end, “COMBAT” is the visionary theme of not giving up, of building it back.

DÍA 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 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, DÍA marks the next phase of Ela Minus’ career and life without declaring where any of it may or must go.