Kelly Lee Owens: daydream believer

“Mission aplomplished,” a young child gleefully exclaims at the very end of Kelly Lee Owens’ new album, Dreamstate. It’s the voice of two-year-old River, the child of Owens’ collaborator Oli Bayston, delightfully botching a rendition of his favourite catchphrase. For the Welsh producer, it captured the childlike wonder she wanted to inhabit on her fourth album. 

Dreamstate will be the first full-length album released on dh2, the new dance-orientated imprint of Dirty Hit and brainchild of The 1975’s George Daniel. Owens had carved out a space between the dingy thud of techno and melodic transcendence of pop on her 2020 album, Inner Song, but the new record stretches her further in both directions, and also towards naked, vulnerable ballads. It’s a stunning step up for an artist who is now confidently inhabiting her truth. 

While writing the new album, Owens was determined to “make the art that my soul wants to make,” ignoring outside influences and following “a path and an energy” that felt like it was coming to her from a higher place. “I always hoped that I’d find a home in a label that would carry that vision through,” she says. When she met Daniel in Los Angeles, she asked him, “Do you care about the long term? How much time are you willing to invest in this project? What do you see?” 

His response? “George knows that nothing is guaranteed, and even with all his success, there’s something humble about him and Dirty Hit,” she says. “They’re such hard workers, and they care so much about really good music. The process felt genuinely right.” Owens was then unveiled as the new label’s first signing, and entered a bold and defiant new era.

“Ballads and bangers was the ethos”

The genesis of Dreamstate began when Owens was working on two tracks with The Chemical Brothers with the working titles of ‘Ballad’ and ‘Banger’. “I kept thinking that this is what I wanted this album to be holistically,” she says. “Ballads and bangers was the ethos.” When the legendary duo’s Tom Rowlands suggested she keep the ballad entry for herself, the Dreamstate highlight ‘Ballad (In the End)’ — with contributions from Rowlands — was born. 

The particular banger from that session remains on the cutting-room floor, but songs throughout Dreamstate firmly deserve that descriptor as well. ‘Dark Angel’ is a transcendent, euphoric opener that is reminiscent of her frequent collaborator Jon Hopkins, while the album’s title track and lead single ‘Love You Got’ don’t shy away from pop melody and structure yet still pack the punch of a four-four kick and chunky bassline. 

Dreamstate is an album of sonic extremes, but it’s bound by its commitment to dreaming and following a spiritual path, and Owens speaks in conversation with the same wide-eyed wonder and animated nature as she has poured into the album. 

Maybe most striking is the album’s closing track, ‘Trust and Desire’. The incredibly sparse, almost ambient, finale sees Owens pining for “someone to live this life with, more than just one kiss”, set over strings recorded by Kate Bush’s nephew, Raven Bush. “I know a lot of people around me also feel that,” she says, “and we have issues with intimacy as a collective. We’re in a very strange place. I’m trying to get this intimacy in our collective spaces, but what about when you come home and you’re on your own? I like being by myself, but I do want to share my life with someone. Saying that on a track, with less cryptic lyrics, is quite new for me. But that’s where I am.” 

After almost always working alone on her previous material, Owens wanted to open herself up to collaboration for her fourth album, and was spurred on by her work with Rowlands. From there, she worked with Bicep, her label boss Daniel and more, also heading to BloodPop’s studio to make music that doesn’t appear on Dreamstate, but which she considers important in her collaborative evolution.

She also found important confidants in Martin Gore of Depeche Mode — Owens played to 75,000 people a night while touring with the band last year — and her co-manager Charli XCX. “Even before Brat, I had a rave green notebook of ideas [for this album],” laughs Owens, describing the energy on both albums as a “collective effort”. Her partnership with Charli, she says, happened completely separately from the label deal with Daniel. 

“When you trust your ideas and trust when something doesn’t feel right, you can make things easier by putting your ego aside,” she says of this new collaborative spirit. “I never thought I’d turn down a track from The Chemical Brothers!” she laughs, still almost in disbelief. “People think that these things are a distant dream, this unreachable thing. I’m just a little girl from a village in Wales who had zero financial help. I found my way into these places because I genuinely love it, and I found a way.” 

Owens — who comes from a working-class family and worked as a nurse on a cancer ward before beginning a music career in indie bands and then under her own name — says it is a “devotional quality” to music that has seen her stick at it. “You end up sacrificing a lot of yourself and your relationships,” she admits, while being keen to highlight continued disparity in gender equality, as well as distribution of wealth and opportunities across the UK in terms of both social class and location.  

Recently, she attended a meeting of Creative Cymru, a new initiative from two Welsh women to foster more collective effort and resources for Welsh artists. Owens laughs that she “dragged” respected Welsh producer and mixer David Wrench — who mixed Dreamstate and whose credits include Frank Ocean and The xx — along with her to the meeting. 

If you either watch Owens’ live show or see her DJ, she is as much a performer as a knob-twiddler. At any moment when she’s not required to tweak the sonics in her set, she’ll be pumping her arms and pacing the front of the stage to whip the crowd up, having earnt her stripes on the Depeche Mode stadium tour, where she performed to the biggest crowds possible. “My purpose is holding space via sound,” she says. “I can do that, and I’m in service of that.” 

Transcendence is a word Owens uses consistently when describing both Dreamstate and her overall purpose as an artist. Sonically, it’s a word most readily attributed to ‘Dark Angel’, the album’s jubilant opening track, named after the Depeche Mode T-shirt with a winged logo that Owens was wearing when she created it. In both her performances on the stadium tour and watching the headline act every night, she felt this transcendence and escapism and poured it into her new album. 

“It’s all about transcending my own pain, transcending any darkness or repetitive unhelpful things in my mind, and spiralling higher and higher above our bullshit,” she says. “I want to transcend my own bullshit and come together with other people and transcend our own bullshit. Music is the fastest gateway to that.” 

On Dreamstate, Owens dreams bigger than ever before and makes an album both full of escapist and deeply vulnerable moments, acknowledging your pain so you can then transcend it. It’s a mission firmly aplomplished.

Taken from the October/November issue of Rolling Stone UK – order it here now.