Elsa y Elmar rebuilds ten of her own songs on the album ciclos

Going back to a song years later means meeting the person who wrote it, and Elsa y Elmar has built a whole record out of that encounter. ciclos revisits ten songs from across the Colombian singer-songwriter's catalogue and rebuilds them from where she stands now, with warmer textures and more organic arrangements than most of the originals carried.

The changes are not cosmetic. Some songs moved genre or production entirely, some picked up new verses, and in certain cases she rewrote lyrics she could no longer sing the same way. She frames the project as a celebration of cycles that have closed, cycles still open, and cycles that have not started yet, which is a tidier description than the individual songs suggest.

One track produced a coincidence she says would have been impossible to plan. "Planeando el tiempo" came from REY and was written and recorded in a single afternoon, with Elsa keeping the vocals she cut while she had a cold because she wanted to preserve the moment. When it came time to record the ciclos version, she was ill again. "Entonces la voz suena con la misma textura," she said, noting the two takes share the same grain.

Her favourite song from the EP Cuatro Veces 10 was rebuilt as light folk, with a single-take video made with Jose Alvarez in which a fossil appears in dialogue with the lyric. Another Cuatro Veces 10 track went the other way: Julian pushed its dance energy further into a remix she describes as one of those tracks for jumping around at a party.

The songs from her first EP, Sentirnos Bien, are where the rewriting bites hardest. For one she added notes in the lyric video addressed to the teenager who wrote it. "Me da tanta ternura recordar la adolescente que era cuando la escribi," she said, adding that she would like to hug that girl and tell her everything will be fine. Another, written when she was still working out her own way of loving, needed its second verse substantially edited before she could sing it again.

Two more went in the opposite direction from each other. "Ya no Somos Los Mismos", originally a bachata, is stripped back as "Atravesao" with a video she describes as beautiful and real. "Nadie Va", originally trap on Eres Diamante, becomes guitar and voice, a change she connects to confidence rather than arrangement: she says she lacked the assurance to sing it when she first recorded it.

The clearest example of what the record is for comes from "No te canses", another Eres Diamante song she thinks went underappreciated. She wrote it during a relationship that was still going, and the song seemed to anticipate its ending. Re-recording it afterwards changed one line: where she once sang that she wanted to run and did not know where, she now sings that she wanted to run and already knows where.

That single edit is close to a thesis for the whole project. ciclos is not a greatest-hits reissue or a stripped-back covers set; it is a songwriter arguing with her own back catalogue in public. It sits alongside a run of latin and pop releases tracked on the release calendar, including Mon Laferte's double album Femme Fatale Vol 2 and Lido Pimienta's Caribenya.