ELIAS

In the organizer's words:

A man crouches on a bulky waste mattress - his head lowered, his face masked. Where he sits, there is

is no one else. The setting appears as orderly as it is terrifying: an open field, a tree, a piece of woodland

A tree, a patch of forest, an autumn sky with a maximum of grain, darkness in a thousand shades of gray. The mysterious man?

Elias. The picture described? A press photo that captures the artistic vision of the newcomer, as well as the vibe

of his debut EP "Wie lässt man los?", more aptly than a thousand words. Nevertheless, let's try

Elias is a singer, rapper and producer who refines sensitive and experimental indie pop with

with an abysmal, bass-heavy hip-hop ambience. Between reverberating pop vocals and head voice

choirs, reduced guitar playing and anti-cyclical drums, everything seems to be allowed in the Elias cosmos - softness clashes with

Gentleness clashes with roughness, meticulous perfectionism atomizes in defiant lack of rules. On the

Elias presents himself as an open book, singing truthfully about the pain of separation and inner conflicts.

inner conflicts. In direct contrast, cryptic imagery shrouds his art in dense fog: Elias'

Elias' exterior, when he ghosts through dense woodland or across unsteady city intersections in his videos

is made unrecognizable either by wild scribbles or a simple storm mask.

Behind the mask hides - this is noticeable even on superficial listening and therefore no secret - a thoroughbred musician.

secret - a thoroughbred musician. Elias is in his mid-twenties, grew up in a Cologne family working in the creative

Cologne and attended his first concert at the age of three. At eighteen he moved to

Berlin - as you do when you want to make music work. In September 2022, the first

first Elias song was written, and the first teasers went viral on TikTok in March 2023. In the course of the

release of said EP, Elias will play his debut concert at Berlin's Monarch on 08.09.2023

- so much for the facts. Does Elias have something to hide? At most that he has been a successful musician

successful musician under a different name, has even gone gold and had songs in English on the

on the radio. Elias ended his first career, which was oriented towards the pop mainstream, last year - in the wake of a

crisis of the mind, but of his own free will. Instead of growth, glitz and glamor

chaos, unrestrainedness and genuine art. Although he could have had business class, a songwriting camp and a

glossy studio, Elias spent two years at his desk, taught himself how to produce and set up a DIY studio.

and cobbled together a DIY EP.

For the first time in his life, inspired by early releases from Paula Hartmann,

Ansu, Levin Liam and Apsilon, he wrote lyrics in German for the first time - associative, edgy, approachable, as pure as possible.

Most of the time, he didn't even need a notepad: the lines flowed directly from his head into the microphone, were often

into the microphone, were often one-shots on the recording side, sometimes rhymed by chance. Elias has

Elias has made maximum use of his new freedoms, unloaded a thousand tons of creativity and has already

already constituted an unmistakable style. Inspired by the sound of Bon Iver and Frank Ocean, Elias has created a

ten square meters, Elias has created a soundscape that could fill entire halls to the rafters. Elias'

preference for powerful basses, organic-analog instrumental playing, field recordings and two-dimensional singing

sang harmonies in the background are reflected in every fiber of his debut EP. All five stations

together seem to form a bittersweet, shimmering ballad, are intertwined and difficult to separate from one another.

difficult to separate from one another. However, this is not due to the sound alone: "Wie lässt man los?"

traces an emotional story of separation in an undulating dramaturgy. The EP is a chronicle

of failed togetherness, a grueling emotional mobilee, a log of sleepless nights.

The fluorescent opener "Drehen uns" - incidentally the first song that Elias completed in the course of his

artistic restart - starts where the shipwreck begins. Where the relationship threatens to

threatens to bog down, heaviness spreads in the chest, problems have long since overshadowed any romance,

and abandonment becomes a serious option. The first album, which was released in April 2023 and has recently been

single "Wie lässt man los" (How to let go), which has recently been streamed in the high three-digit range

thoughts. Powerless and head-sunk, Elias - embedded in gentle, rainy guitar playing - poses the core question of the

core question of the EP in the room: "How am I alone?". In the paradoxically playful "Gehen", the farewell becomes

sad certainty. Doubt becomes Elias' constant companion here at the latest: "How can I give up the

give up thebest thing I ever had?". The newfound loneliness multiplies with structureless emotional chaos

chaos - the cosmic "TML Interlude", an image of 808-supported distortion stitched together from two sketches

distortion, impressively sums up this mood. "TML Interlude" finally leads into the

dreamy final track "Laufen". Although Elias seems to have distanced himself from the separation at this point

his life remains unbalanced: "I'm running in my own four walls". In the

powerful finale of the song, however, the autumn sky described at the beginning seems to clear

clear - it's all just a phase, isn't it?

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