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The six-time Latin GRAMMY-nominated singer-songwriter and producer, Elsa y Elmar, has announced her third studio album PALACIO, out 30th August 2024 via her independent label, Elmar Presenta.   Much like the sea for which she named herself, the essence of Elsa y Elmar moves with the tides. Yet the anchor to her genre-meandering “spiritual pop” is her unsparing, confessional approach to songwriting. In Palacio, she plumbs the depths of her soul, searching for a bigger meaning in her most personal anxieties and romantic mishaps; she surfaces with pearls of synthy, alt-pop wisdom to share with others wading in the same deep waters.   “It’s very complex, the spiritual dimensions of us millennials,” says the CDMX-based, Colombian-born artist, whose real name is Elsa Margarita Carvajal. “I try to capture that in my music. We’re all about giving others a space for their feelings. That’s a pretty spiritual experience!”   Produced in collaboration with Latin GRAMMY-winning musical director Julián Bernal (Sebastian Yatra, Kali Uchis), Palacio serves as a creative sanctuary for Elsa, who teases out her emotional and musical metamorphosis in 11 dynamic songs. Guided by guitars and sparkling with Elsa’s pop flair, the album includes only one feature: a cameo from Spanish vocalist, Álvaro de Luna who revels in the alternative contours of “Visto.”   “Each song is its own genre, a planet in the solar system whose axis is my obsession with knowing myself, exploring myself and improving myself,” explains Elsa.   “I made Palacio as an act of trust [in] life, creativity, art, and as an act of rebellion towards the structure and demands of the current music industry,” she adds. “In Palacio, beauty and error, seriousness and play, happiness and sadness, love and heartbreak coexist — but above all, freedom.”   Born in the Andean town of Bucaramanga, Colombia, the 30-year-old singer-songwriter grew up playing guitar and the flute; she was encouraged to start making music professionally after writing witty, personalized versions of Shakira songs for her friends. Yet upon entering the recording studio for the first time, 16-year-old Elsa felt alienated by the pressure to conform to the industry standards for Latin pop. “These producers not only wanted me to use songs already written for me by a stranger in Miami,” she says, “But they said I’d look prettier if I took off my braces. I knew there had to be another way, so I went to school for music.”   Elsa braved the unforgiving Boston winters to study at the Berklee College of Music, where she graduated in 2015 with a Bachelor’s degree in music performance. There she recorded a 2013 EP titled Sentirnos Bien — from which her song, "Me Viene Bien,” won the Grand Prize in the Latin category of the 2014 John Lennon Songwriting Contest. She followed up with her 2015 debut album, Rey, an early sketch of her signature electro-pop sound.   In 2019, Elsa pumped up the volume with her Caribbean-faring pop album, Eres Diamante, and landed a nomination in the category of Best New Artist at the Latin Grammys that year. In 2020, she was nominated for Best Pop Song, thanks to her work as a co-writer on the Ximena Sariñana single, “Una Vez Más.” After releasing her 2022 LP, ya no somos los mismos, Elsa counted three more nominations that year, including for Album of the Year and Best Engineered Album.   After surviving the earth-shattering breakup that triggered ya no somos los mismos — and a serious health scare that landed her in a hospital — “I woke up with nothing to lose and full of desire to live and create,” says Elsa. She spent the summer traveling with friends in Europe, searching for a more adventurous Elsa. “I went from Berlin to Tenerife, Italy, Madrid,” she says.   Instead of kissing a procession of hot foreign strangers, as planned, the journey led Elsa back to the songs that built Palacio. The summer yielded her the Balearic house-inspired track, “Lento Violento,” as well as the melancholic dance cut “Drogado de Emociones.” In order to bring balance, she pulled back the polish with her angsty punk-pop of “Ke mAL;” and in “A Ella,” she cautions the future lover of her abusive ex, with an otherwise light, amiable tone that evokes Cibo Matto.   “I don’t like to imitate what I hear, so I have to put it through my world,” she says of her blended pop sound. “In indie music, you grab the guitar and you just go: ‘Wah-wah-wah!’ Together with Julián Bernal, my musical partner, we produced the PALACIO songs one by one, with [respect to] the naiveté [and] the impulsiveness of our first ideas.”   Released this year on March 1, the first day of Women’s History Month, Elsa chose the single “entre las piernas” to become her first release in two years. What began as a revelation during the artist’s moon time — “I was super PMSing,” she says with a laugh — culminated in a pulsating, feminist alt-pop anthem, in which her confidence soars higher than ever before. Directed by Frederick Venet and produced by Georgian animation studio The Crux, the music video depicts a lush, jungle environs populated with colorful vaginal blooms, illustrated in a style that evokes the enduring beauty of Pre-Columbian art. “Women truly carry the world,” says Elsa. “How many women at any given moment will be walking around the city center, carrying a mountain of blood between their legs? Beyond blood, we carry so many burdens — we also carry the expectations of how you should behave, how you should look like, how you shouldn’t get too angry lest you become hysterical. This is the body that I inhabit as an artist. This is my experience. I needed this to embody myself.”   Draped in pink and peach chiffon, Elsa becomes the living centerpiece of her own art exhibit, in the video for her latest single: the ethereal folk-pop theme of “Palacio,” a soul-baring invitation into the safe haven she describes as her “Interior Museum of Emotional Landscapes.”   “Elsa is your friend, your confidant, your diary,” she says of the album. “The palace is OUR space, and music is our safe place.”