ELI is the complete package—just what every producer wishes for. And yet one of his producers puts it in a nutshell even more precisely: “Elias’s strength is that you believe in him instantly.” True dat! Once you hear Elias’s voice, even for just a few seconds, you’ll understand that nobody is faking it here or making songs that are fit for radio simply for the sake of being played on the radio. Someone is singing because he has to sing, because he is incapable of doing otherwise.

And that’s no wonder: after all, he started playing his drums at the tender age of three, wrote his first songs aged 10, and tried out just about everything in the time in between, from piano to violin—sometimes to his parents’ dismay. But only when he discovered the guitar for himself, did the passion turn into a certainty: I’m going to be a musician. Somehow a logical consequence when you hear the story that his mother, an actress and musical performer, initially concealed her pregnancy at the theatre and kept regularly performing on the big stage. If you’ve been hearing an audience’s applause since you were in the womb, you probably have no other choice.

Ten years later, not only has ELI’s personal dream come true, but with songs like “Change Your Mind”, which became the sound of a huge advertising campaign, he has a solid record of successes. More than 70 million streams for the song on Spotify alone say it all. After his time at the in-house label that he founded with his father, a concert promoter, where he took over all the tasks himself, it felt like the right time to take the next step to a major label. Together with producer teams like Truva and YouGuys, songs were composed that will take ELI to the next level.