So much success in the music industry comes down to luck, or, to put it more prosaically, just being in the right place at the right time. For Welsh electronic artist Kelly Lee Owens, that place and time seems to be Right Now. Managed by pop megastar Charli xcx, and signed to new “it” label dh2, the electronic offshoot of Dirty Hit helmed by xcx’s fiancé and sometime DJ partner George Daniel (also the drummer and creative mastermind of The 1975), Owens spent some of this year swept up into the vortex of Brat Summer. She played a set at xcx’s viral Partygirl Ibiza and appeared alongside Daniel and xcx at a series of events to mark the launch of dh2, debuting some tracks from “Dreamstate”. This dizzying round of activity means, a palpable buzz has been building around the release of the album, the first full-length dh2 release. Owens has found herself profiled in Rolling Stone magazine and tipped by other music media pillars as the Next Big Thing.
The truth about luck is, it generally takes a lot of hard work and a lot of time to make it happen. Owens knows this acutely. Having spent her youth working first as an auxiliary nurse on cancer wards, then in London record shops, playing in indie bands and knocking about with the likes of Foals frontman Yannis Philipakis and Jack Steadman of Bombay Bicycle Club, Owens has spent the past seven years carving out an enviable reputation amongst music critics and a niche but devoted fanbase. She’s even joked, that her trademark black wavy bob is the “Rachel Haircut” of the indie scene. Each of her three previous albums, including 2020’s “Inner Song” and 2022’s “LP8” have won rave reviews. She wrote the theme tune for the FIFA 2023 Women’s World Cup, that was performed at the Opening Ceremony and every subsequent match, and played to many thousands more across the US last year as the support act for Depeche Mode. All this means Kelly Lee Owens may just be the biggest artist you didn’t know you’d heard of.
Then again, Owens isn’t one for empty self-promotion or trading on her connections. She has always been independent in her creative process, mostly writing and producing her albums alone. Her music is strong enough to speak for itself, but even that’s often not enough to bring success for an artist. Nothing is guaranteed, as Daniel told Owens frankly, when she signed to dh2 last year. So it’s especially heartening, given her years of grafting, to witness Owens’ star in the ascendent on her fourth, and strongest, album.
Besides being released on the back of Owens’ own version of Brat Summer, “Dreamstate” benefits from dropping at a time when electronic music is once again King (or more aptly Queen, given the number of prominent club-oriented records by women this year) and the sounds and aesthetics of the late 90s and early 2000s are having a revival.
Owens has long cited the dance-leaning acts who dominated this period in music history – The Chemical Brothers, Bjork, “Kid A”-era Radiohead, “Ray of Light” period Madonna – as major influences. Each of Owens’ albums have gone to different corners of the electronic music map, but on “Dreamstate” she leans in fully to where she seems to truly belong: the place where techno meets dream pop. A concept album of sorts, the album’s title comes from Owens’ own experience of finding transcendence and the highest forms of happiness through the dream state. Music, for her, has always been “a direct door” to access it, and the album represents her reclaiming of “the parts of me that had been shamed before: it’s derogatory to be a daydreamer”.
The result is a tight album of ten transcendent, hypnotic songs showcasing Owens’ ethereal voice, which carries the same emotional heft as Tracey Thorn or Hannah Reid of London Grammar. Owens loves the reverence her home country of Wales has for the voice; one of the factors that make her such a standout electronic artist is that, like contemporary Fred Gibson/Fred again, Owens can bring her own, distinctive singing voice to her art. She’s capable of holding a crowd in the palm of her hand as both a singer and a DJ. Owens’ fondness for stripped-back production serves her well too. Unlike some electronic artists and producers, she knows innately that you don’t need to use every plug-in or throw a crate-load of samples at a track to build energy or lend emotional resonance. Simply adjusting a tempo or a bass drop at the crucial moment can be all that’s needed to transport the listener to another emotional landscape entirely, and “Dreamstate” offers a masterclass in this.
The two musical touchstones of “Dreamstate” are second single “Sunshine”, a slice of euphoric techno that’s almost EDM, which Owens wrote back in 2020 but shelved, concerned it was maybe too much of a leap, and the soaring, meditative synth track “Ballad (In the End)”, written in 2022 and co-produced with Tom Rowlands of The Chemical Brothers. The album’s other eight tracks orbit around these two. The nearly six-minute title track is almost onomatopoeic, pairing a techno beat that gradually builds in intensity with Owens’ transcendent vocal to brilliant effect. Lead single “Love You Got” is a euphoric techno dance floor classic. “Higher” cleaves most closely to pop both sonically and structurally, while the more chilled tones of “Rise” sound like the musical equivalent of a mojito on the terrace of an Ibiza club.
“Dreamstate” in fact plays out much like a night at your favourite club, every song taking you higher and higher in pursuit of that euphoric state that dance music possesses the unique ability to elicit in us. The astonishing, symphonic “Trust and Desire”, whose Celtic tones and choral harmonies remind us of Owens’ Welsh roots, returns us to the moment. The lyrics almost seem to foreshadow Owens’ own artistic journey in their acknowledgement that some things in life are out of our control: “Timing’s not up to me. Wish I could see what’s to be.” Ultimately too it leaves the listener with the sense that, as strong as “Dreamstate” is, what Kelly Lee Owens does next could be the most interesting thing of all. She might become pop’s next great crossover star. She might be the world’s next superstar DJ. She might go in a different direction entirely. But whatever she does, rest assured she’ll be firmly at the helm, setting the direction and enjoying every moment.