A woman’s woollen torso lies on its back: headless, without arms, legless below the knees, pieces of fabric stitched together across its curves, and on her belly, a house. The sculpture ‘Femme Maison, 2001’ by French-American artist Louise Bourgeois sits at London’s Southbank Centre in 2022, and as Spanish musician Elsa Hackett Esteban wanders through the space during a visit that year, it catches her attention. “The next day, I had a session at XL Recordings,” Esteban – better known as Elsas – tells NME. “I said: this is it, this is the line.
“In my womb, I built a house for you,” she haunts over ‘In My Womb’, the bolero closer from her February EP ‘Aporiamor’, released four years following this seedling inspiration. An exploration of nurturing women “giving [themselves] away too lightly”, the song only scratches the surface of Esteban’s knack for sculpting guttural feminine devotion and obliteration in love with painterly tragedy and literary sensibility.
Over a choppy video chat, the 29-year-old wanders outside a sound-checking venue in Lyon, France, where she’s supporting Canadian electronic band Austra. “There’s a feminist undertone to a lot of my lyrics,” she muses. Like Bourgeois’ installation, Esteban’s ornate artistry depicts womanhood through abstractions. ‘Aporiamor’, for example – the London-based artist’s second collection following 2021’s ‘The Art Of The Concrete’ – features candid confessions from a modern “lover girl” over experimental, choral alt-pop.
Framed by a fabricated Latin portmanteau meaning “the death of love’s contradiction”, its title imagines a pure love free from complication and heartache, only to contain tracks that prove its impossibility. “My titles are self-affirmations, but anything that’s alive is always moving and changing,” she explains, reckoning with the instability of love. “It would be a contradiction of life itself to try [to] find something static and unmovable.”
The crawling, incendiary ‘Fireworm’ depicts necessary post-break-up self-reinvention; the dark surrealism of ‘The Splinter (In His Eye)’ traces the wounds behind an ex’s alcoholism; and the electronic ‘Niño’ combatively addresses the immature male prototype – perhaps the only constant. “Life is telling me to be an artist. Getting my heart broken is a great muse,” she explains. “I’m a lover girl. I try to keep my heart open because that’s what makes life good. But shit, we are cooked. Where are all the yearning men? They’re all horrible and self-absorbed, especially the British ones.”
Raised by a British father and Argentinian mother in Barcelona, Esteban first moved to the UK over a decade ago to study jazz at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. “Going from Spain to England is a huge leap,” she explains. “Coming from Spain, my musical knowledge was slim. I’d never heard of Aphex Twin until I got to Guildhall.”
Esteban’s childhood was coloured by classical, romantic and jazz music, played by her parents around the house. Soon, she began training at a local conservatoire: “I wanted to learn. My dad played the piano; he’d play ‘The Entertainer’ over and over again. We have really good institutions in Spain, and they’re cheap. It’s amazing I had access to [that] education.”
Later, choral singing – sparked by an obsession with French musical Les Choristes and a placement in the prestigious children’s choir Cor Infantil Amics de la Unió – scaffolded the emotive language around harmony that defines her grandiose sound today. “It became the epicentre of my musicianship,” she says. Meanwhile, Green Day, Beyoncé and Queen diversified her teen years.
This dual heritage – and competing classicality versus contemporaneity – is central to Elsas’ proposition. Around the creation of ‘Aporiamor’, Esteban sought to embrace and consolidate this hybridity. “Everyone is finding a language to express emotion. I’m leaning into what feels authentic; my way of articulating emotion.”
Consequently, the multilingual EP finds elements of reggaeton and R&B awash between contemporary electronic alt-pop, while Esteban’s choir-trained vocals drive a Mediterranean antiquity. ‘Aporiamor’ careens from cerebral, choral balladry (‘Fireworm’) to buzzing, industrial electronica (‘Niño’) with resolve, yet never abandoning its freedom. In stitching together this oscillating sonic framework, Esteban found a concrete sense of identity in her dual heritage. “There’s a sedimentation of something that feels like a voice, even though there’s not a [specific] genre I identify with. It’s been years of exploring my craft; I’ve distilled the parts that feel right,” she says.
This distillation is part thanks to the Idrîsî Ensemble, a Mediterranean medieval vocal group that Esteban is part of. “Exploring the ancestry of my voice [in the group] made me reconnect with the poetry of my heritage. My poetic language has always been built around English-speaking music,” she explains, pointing out that English has a “huge, amazing” vocabulary, “but there’s a more primordial place for Spanish in me […] And I want people to connect to Spanish music. That’s the vibe, now. That music is arriving in the [English-speaking] world.”
Case in point, at the 2026 BRIT Awards, fellow Catalonian singer Rosalía won the International Artist category for her 2025 classical, avant-garde, multilingual pop record ‘Lux’, and urged the industry to celebrate diversity in music, culture and language. “I was really happy she won and said what she said,” says Esteban. “In a post-Brexit landscape, it feels like I’m a minority […] I want to continue being part of that otherness.” She also aspires to a similar grandiosity as Rosalía achieved on ‘Lux’. “Making an orchestra album is my dream. My biggest objective is to have enough budget to make a record as epic in calibre, to express without limitation.”
I want people to connect to Spanish music. That’s the vibe, now. That music is arriving in the [English-speaking] world
Later this month, she’ll perform her first headlining slot at London’s The Waiting Room. “In an ideal world, I’d have a 20-piece band,” she admits. For the last two-and-a-half years, she’s toured with British alt-R&B singer (and now close friend) Sampha as part of his live band, playing keys and back-up vocals. There’s a standard already set. “I want [my shows] to be an experience, not a gig.”
Ultimately, Esteban’s exaltation of Mediterranean antiquity and classical-inspired grandeur joins a renaissance in Spanish pop. In the music video for ‘In My Womb’, Elsas is a gallery attraction, not unlike ‘Femme Maison, 2001’: a female figure, visible, venerated, vulnerable. Her lovesick tales through centuries ogled, gawked. It suggests Esteban’s “lover girl” stories are universal, infused with a legacy of Mediterranean womanhood, a torch passed down to and by Elsas – a ‘primordial’ energy in perpetuity.
“It’s the feminine divine,” Esteban sings on ‘Finalise U’. “Without sounding too exalted,” she confesses, wandering in the sun, “it’s fun to explore Elsas as an immortal entity that spans beyond the physical realm. […] I want my music to last, and to touch people.”
Elsas’ ‘Aporiamor’ EP is out now via Lapsus Records.