In the liner notes for her 2017 self-titled debut LP, Welsh electronic producer Kelly Lee Owens includes a quote by German author and polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: “Whatever you dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now.”
Released when she was 28-years-old following a stint working in London’s record shops and as an auxiliary nurse in palliative care, Kelly Lee Owens was a culmination of years of absorbing music and beauty on her journey thus far. The dream to create and produce her own music, something she’d harbored since she was a child, eventually became a reality.
On her fourth album, Dreamstate, Owens is still thinking big. The new record, due out on Friday (Oct. 18), sees her collaborate with dance royalty The Chemical Brothers, as well as one of the biggest names on the circuit, Northern Irish techno duo Bicep.
She’s also newly signed to Dirty Hit – home to The 1975, Bleachers and Beabadoobee – and their dance music-focused imprint DH2 to be their inaugural release. The imprint was set up by The 1975 drummer George Daniel and Dirty Hit general manager Ed Blow; Daniel also appears on the record in a producer role.
“This feels like the beginning of a new phase,” Owens tells Billboard of the move from Norwegian indie label Smalltown Supersound to DH2. “A new team felt right. I’m grateful for the past and the present, but I’m excited about the future because I really do believe that DH2 is really going to show the world some great dance music.”
Where Owens’ previous work was a sparse, sometimes experimental take on techno, house and pop, Dreamstate is more euphoric and maximalist. Lead single “Love You Got” is as radio-friendly as her material has ever been, pairing classic songwriting with pounding drums and synths. “Ballad (The End),” co-written with The Chemical Brothers’ Tom Rowlands, includes a string arrangement by Owens and builds to an emotional crescendo. These were new avenues to explore.
2020’s Inner Song, which reached No.30 on the UK’s Dance Charts, showed hints of this direction. But 2022’s LP.8, a knotty, left field collection, put paid to that clean upward trajectory.
Even so, the collection and her previous work caught the ear of Depeche Mode, who enlisted Owens to join them as a support act on the road for their mammoth Memento Mori tour. She speaks of the awe of opening the band’s shows in US arenas and Mexico City’s Foro Sol stadium, where the Mode headlined to 195,000 fans over three sold-out nights.
“Without knowing it at the time, they really instilled confidence in me,” she says of the selection. The band’s songwriter and keyboardist Martin Gore also gave crucial feedback on Dreamstate during its formation. As did Xavier de Rosnay of French electro duo Justice, who Owens met a decade ago while she was still bassist in the indie band The History of Apple Pie.
The conviction dovetailed with Owens’ role as executive producer on Dreamstate, a new challenge which included recruiting collaborators far and wide but retaining a singular vision. She points to her heroes Björk and Kate Bush as artists who have done so successfully. “It was something that at this point in my career I felt that I wanted and, more than that, needed,” she says. “Initially I thought that that would mean letting go of control more, but when you create with different people across different songs on an album, you have to be surer than ever of your vision.”
Owens was born in rural north Wales and says that Dreamstate taps into some of those formative experiences growing up, even when the creative industries, or simply just taking time to dream and reflect, can feel out of reach particularly for working class artists. “There is no separation between my personal life and what I do music and it’s an all-encompassing thing,” she says. “There’s a lot of sacrifice which a lot of people who don’t do this [career] don’t want to hear about.”
She moved to London and began working in record shops including Sister Ray in Soho and Pure Groove in Archway. There she met future collaborators, DJs Daniel Avery and James Greenwood, and began writing and recording her solo material. It has been a story that has stepping stones, gradual increments rather than overambitious leaps. Now she’s at a point in her life where the monumental achievements – she played Glastonbury Festival for the first time in June – mean even more to her.
“I actually didn’t want to be a big, massive, first album success because I watched a lot of my friends or people around me do that and found that they had nowhere to go,” she says. “I want to encourage artists to know that in your 30s you can be reaching a place with your inner confidence. You’ll get those absolutely epic firsts and you know you deserve to be there.”
Another first came through Charli XCX – who is engaged to Owens’ collaborator and label boss Daniel – when she hosted her Boiler Room party in Ibiza, and selected Owens to appear on the bill at Amnesia, her first time performing at the Balearic superclub. She joined a stacked bill including Charli, Shygirl, Robyn, Romy from The xx and more.
She’s a fan of Charli’s Brat and loves that the lines between pop chart hits and the club remain blurred. “We have so many sides to ourselves and as an artist, you need to be free to explore all of it as long as it’s genuinely authentic to you people will feel that,” she says.
Dreamstate is precisely that; all it took, as Goethe wrote, was Owens to be bold enough to begin it.
