“Feel it resonate(wanting pure euphoria)” This is the transcendental crescendo point on ‘Love you Got‘ a standout from Kelly Lee Owen‘s fourth album Dreamstate. It’s an addictive floor-filling song, that finds Owens in the eye of a moment, beckoning on a reconnection with joy and surfing celestial choruses, dappling synths and bouncing beats. It’s one that’s symbolic of the entire record.
After the Covid-19 pandemic and a romantic break-up, Owens began the next level of her personal and spiritual evolution. Dreamstate was born from that inner journey she went on. With Dreamstate she sculpts the sounds she had spent the last ten years developing and invests them with a new spirit. The euphoric melodies and melodic peaks that ask the listener to ascend in their minds were inspired by the first live shows she played in 2021 post-pandemic, to 75,000 people a night, supporting Depeche Mode. “Dreaming alone is important but ultimately what I realised after [the pandemic] was that the dream state exists so we can commune and dream together,” she says.
Eskewing the more esoteric sounds of her last record 2022’s LP.8 and returns to the electronic pop tapestries of her first two albums, her 2017 self-titled debut and 2020’s brilliant Welsh Music Prize-winning Innersong. Owens grew up in North Wales among breathtaking landscapes that have always inspired the sonics of her music. She is supercharging and crystalizing her palette of dreamy electronica, and joy chasing trance, pushing her sonic vista as far as it will go, infusing it with melodic register scaling pop hooks, emotional epiphanies given voice by Owens’s voice that has grown in strength and clarity in recent years, with bravery in her heart and an artistic vision that can look beyond the horizon in her mind’s eye.
Dreamstate is a record that urges the listener to dream big and grasp that moment. “When you come from a working class background or you don’t have any help and support, it’s more important than ever to dream about what’s possible for yourself. Because it’s not going to get handed to you—it just isn’t,” she says. “Give yourself permission to dream bigger.”
At the backbone of Dreamstate is a heady sound that taps into a period in the early 90s when techno, trance and rave went mainstream, and retools it for the 2020s.
Opener ‘Dark Angel‘ is positively translucent, with glimmering loops, exultant beats and keys, that spiral like a flock of birds soaring and spinning across blue skies. The title track blinks and bleeps underpinned by a pulsing beat, Owens’s layered vocals: lucid vocals washes and hypnotic mantras, infusing the track with an intoxicating ambient quality, it’s mildly redolent of the Orb’s ‘Pink fluffy Clouds‘, but meditating in its spheres. ‘Higher‘ builds to a drop with post-rave textures, echoing the heady feeling of being in the middle a dancefloor, reminding me of ‘Ray of Light‘ by Madonna, in how it scales melodic peaks. ‘Sunshine‘ is an uplifting gem, riven with glistening synths like flashing strobes and whisps of heavenly melody, it’s like the morning sun radiating upon your warm face.
As well as a clear eye’d ambition, Dreamstate is built on the foundations of collaboration. With writing features from Bicep, on the blissful trance track ‘Rise’ that shifts the tempo up a notch on a framework of intricate luminous melodies and blinking synths. She also worked with The Chemical Brothers, on the gorgeous moment ‘Ballad (In The End)’), which has echoes of early Bjork laced with her most affecting vocal yet, staring at the light at the end as sighing strings and twinkling pianos guide the way, like night lights in the dark as she asks herself to stay open, urging herself to trust “something bigger than me”.
Despite these collaborations, Owens is still very much directing the entire project “I was so curious to see where my energy could meet with someone else’s,” she explains. “And, more importantly, if I was capable of still being the Executive Producer and it still sounding like me, even though I’m working with different people to write.”
On the blissful ‘Time To’ she meditates on how it’s finally safe to let go of the past and open her heart again, framed in bubbling loops. The haunting closing track ‘Trust and Desire’ with grandly simmering strings played by Kate Bush’s nephew, and an enveloping vocal that spreads like water into every crack of the soul, acting as a vulnerable reminder to forgive yourself for what you did when you were less experienced in life. “Know better, do better,” she calls as if to the spirits in the air, it feels like a promise to herself.
Dreamstate vividly depicts an artist who has plugged into her experiences, climbed her own peak and is able to survey the view from the top of the mountain. Reconnected with her spirit, distilling her sound and finding her voice, not just as a songwriter but as a human being. If you dream big you never know what you might achieve. In the process she has manifested her best album yet.