In a world where artists are often cautioned to stay in their lane – to maintain a recognisable brand so you don’t get lost in a crowded, confusing market – there’s something impressive about Kelly Lee Owens. For the last seven years, her career has constituted a series of handbrake turns, fuelled by a disinclination to make the same record twice. Her debut album situated her at the nexus of ambient techno, shoegazing’s dreamy textures and the warm lo-fi fuzz of bedroom pop: for all its reliance on electronics, it was possible to detect that Owens had previously spent time as the bassist in an indie band, the History of Apple Pie. Inner Song, from 2020, was both more straightforwardly melodic and – with its four-to-the-floor beats – more dancefloor-focused; 2022’s LP.8 offered dark-hued ambience punctuated by punishingly distorted rhythms and almost nothing in the way of hooks: Owens spent more time incanting spoken word than she did singing.
After its release, Owens found herself supporting Depeche Mode on tour around the kind of immense US venues the band have been filling since time immemorial. Previously an alumnus of left-field Norwegian label Smalltown Supersound, she signed a new record deal, with dh2, a new electronic wing of Dirty Hit, helmed by George Daniel of the 1975. She also entered the orbit of Daniel’s fiancee, Charli xcx, appearing at her Partygirl event in Ibiza at the start of the summer.
An arena tour, a high-profile label, a co-sign from 2024’s defining pop star: it’s tempting to wonder how much that sequence of events influenced Owens’s fourth album. True to form, Dreamstate sounds almost nothing like its predecessor. It may also be Owens’ most ambitious album in so far as it simultaneously attempts to function as mainstream pop music – centred on her vocals, which appear on virtually every track, albeit occasionally in wordless, sampled form – as well as to provide a beat-focused, small-hours club soundtrack and to work as a complete home-listening experience. She has always attracted an impressive array of collaborators, from Daniel Avery, who first encouraged her into the studio, to John Cale and actor Michael Sheen, who respectively sang on and starred in the video for her 2020 single Corner of My Eye. This time, it feels telling that the guest list includes Tom Rowlands, who succeeded in straddling the aforementioned boundaries in the 90s as one half of the Chemical Brothers – there’s something of the duo’s trademark disorientating psychedelic shimmer about his co-production Ballad (in the End) – and Bicep, who achieved something similar just as Owens’ career was getting under way.
Initially at least, you worry that a desire to communicate to a broader audience has led Owens to smooth out the idiosyncrasies that made her previous albums so effective: opener Dark Angel and Sunshine feel not unlike a more tasteful, Instagram-filter take on the big, hollow sound of late 90s Gatecrasher trance. But as Dreamstate progresses, it becomes apparent that Owens is just deploying her idiosyncrasies more subtly than before. The results feel pop-facing without resorting to pop-dance cliches. Rather than stick a standard song structure over club-friendly beats, its tracks take a more holistic and involving route, fixing on hypnotic, endlessly repeated single vocal lines, allowing the music to build and shift around them, relying on chord changes and melodic instrumental hooks instead of big choruses.
There’s an argument that the lyrics she’s singing aren’t up to much. The problem with the ineffable state of dancefloor transcendence as a topic is that it’s ineffable, and Dreamscape’s attempts to capture it feel well-worn: “higher and higher I go”; “wanting pure euphoria”. But the words Owens is singing matter less than their absorbing repetition, which transforms them into part of a succession of enveloping soundscapes. The title track’s mid-tempo chug gradually becomes more and more acidic, while Rise’s evocation of daylight hitting your face as you leave a club is really well done: the insistent pulse of its beat is relegated to somewhere in the distance, as if taking place behind closed doors, the DJ still playing to the dancefloor you’ve just departed.
The album’s second half feels becalmed, sinking into a series of ballads, the tempo winding down until the beats vanish entirely, replaced by strings on closer Trust and Desire. The alternately reflective and spaced-out aftermath of the previously evoked night out and the hint of weariness in what Owens is singing – “it’s time to let go of hearts that are still frozen” – are undercut by the warmth of the music and the sound of her voice. Dreamstate largely achieves its multifunctional aims. Whether it can turn Owens into an actual pop star is unclear, but perhaps that’s not the point: after all, given her past form, the follow-up will most likely be completely different.
This week Alexis listened to
Shae Universe – Ebbs and Flows
Appended to the new, deluxe edition of her debut album, a better song than its bonus track status suggests: loose, free-flowing neo-soul, tradtional and out-there in equal part.
