Kelly Lee Owens has spoken to NME about her new album ‘Dreamstate’’, being driven by the spirit of collaboration, and releasing it on Dirty Hit’s new spin-off dance label.
The Welsh musician and producer’s latest LP will be released later this week (October 18), and is the first record to be released via dh2 (Dirty Hit’s new electronic imprint being spearheaded by The 1975’s George Daniel).
“Ultimately it’s arriving at a place in my life where I accept who I am,” Owens told NME, “and the parts of me that had been shamed before: it’s derogatory to be a daydreamer, and actually the happiest parts of myself are when I’m either in those states alone, or those states alone allow me to come together with other people in those states.”
She continued: “It’s the thing that I almost enjoy the most about being human, ironically, is finding a dreamstate, and I feel on a bigger collective level, it’s also what’s needed most as a reminder of the importance of taking the time away to dream and to be in that place. Music, for me, has always been a direct door to get to a dreamstate.”
Check out our full interview below, where Owens tells NME about the universe of ‘Dreamstate’, exploring lyrics with Charli XCX, her expanded team of collaborators on the album (including Bicep, The Chemical Brothers’ Tom Rowlands and George Daniel) as well as her time touring with Depeche Mode and the musical influence of Madonna’s seminal ‘Ray of Light’ – the latter was something she simply “could not get away from”.
NME: Hey Kelly. When did work on ‘Dreamstate’ begin?
Owens: “The track ‘Sunshine’ was made in the final sessions for [2020 album] ‘Inner Song’, around the time that I was making ‘Luminous Spaces’, the remix with Jon Hopkins. I remember hearing [‘Sunshine’] and thinking: ‘Oh, this is a bit shiny for me. This is a bit, maybe on a tinge of pop, or what even people would even call at the time EDM’…
“I thought, ‘Well I’ll just put that there, aside’. I’m not someone who has many, many, many spare tracks lying around. I create – and I usually finish – most things, but this one was just there bubbling away.”
How did that inspire the rest of the record?
“After making [2022 album] ‘LP.8’, I was very much ready to springboard off myself into a world that was brighter. One of the first tracks [written] was ‘Ballad (In The End)’, because Tom [Rowlands, Chemical Brothers] had sent me a few tracks for the previous Chemical Brothers album. One was really upbeat, almost what you’d always expect from The Chemical Brothers, and that was a big banger. So I changed the name to ‘Banger’; and the other one was ‘Ballad’, and this has been kept.
“I wrote and recorded the lyrics and the vocals for [‘Ballad’] in my bedroom. I think it was January last year, as a demo. So that’s the only track where this vocal is one take. It really is just a moment in time that I could not recreate after coming back to trying. Then Tom was generous enough to agree that [it] really belonged on my album.
“So I had ‘Sunshine’, and I had [‘Ballad (In The End)], and in a way, that was the foundation of maybe my own version of ‘bangers and ballads’, and where we could go with that.”
Was there a shift in the way you approached this record?
“It did happen naturally to a degree. I was ready to make another record and I just knew it was time. but there was a very conscious decision to widen the net – to bring people in, and to discover where our creative minds and hearts met, in a way that I haven’t done with several people. I’ve maybe worked with one other person on a project, but this was quite a challenge, because it was like: ‘How is this still going to be me?’.
“It’s not easy to work with different people on different tracks and it still be your own, so you have to be stronger and more self-assured than ever. To throw yourself into rooms of people who you don’t know sometimes, or a Chemical Brother…it’s really nerve wracking!”
Did that come with a lot of pressure?
“Honestly I’m not joking, I was touring with Depeche Mode, playing with Underworld – yeah I’m going to namedrop [laughs] – all these massive things, but then also making music with all these crazy people. Even doing sessions with Bloodpop, who’d only said yes to, I don’t know, Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, and me that year, and I’m just going: ‘What is going on?’
“My nervous system was completely shot, but in a way where I was so proud of myself that I just leaped, had this leap of faith every day into some new scenario, and actually that was what was required – and necessary – at this point in my career.”
What was it like touring with Depeche Mode?
“Just being around Depeche Mode was a huge thing, because how could it not be playing to anything from between 20,000 to 75,000 people a night? Being taken under the wing of a band like that – and I don’t just mean the tour bit that I did, I would just go hang out. I felt like I belonged to a family, and sometimes as a solo artist you don’t always have that, so I felt kind of adopted by Depeche Mode. And for obvious reasons [they’re] pioneers when it comes to marrying pop and electronic dance music.”
With this record, you’ve said you wanted to “see if you were still capable of being an exec producer” when you had so many collaborators feeding in. How did that role differ for you on this album?
“It was sitting with myself and really understanding… and being like ‘OK, I know what’s good to me’. It’s very simple in a way, it’s: ‘I know what my tastes are, and I know ultimately the emotion I’m trying to convey’. I’m extremely detail oriented in order to get to the maximum of that emotion.
“There are ideas people, who are constantly coming up with new ideas, and there are people who finish things. I’m good at finishing things, I’m great at editing, I’m great at arranging and knowing if that initial idea is going to work or not. So I had to cling on for dear life, and when I didn’t like something or resonate with it, I had to really be like: ‘No, this is not it’, and trust myself. It sounds so simple, but it kind of is that simple: nothing has to be super complicated, you either feel it or you don’t.”
Do you have any examples of keeping the emotion at the heart of the song?
“In ‘Ballad’. I think it was actually [with] Charli XCX, we were exploring the lyrics that I’d written and we were questioning [the line] ‘Love is blind’ – that’s been said a million times; but I wrote that in the throes of this stream of consciousness and that is how I felt. I tried to rewrite it, and I came up with what I’d describe as ‘really clever lyrics’, but they just did not flow, and so you have to follow the emotion.”
You were the first signing to The 1975’s George Daniel’s new electronic music imprint on Dirty Hit, dh2. How did this happen?
“I was in touch with George a little bit over the last few years, and we would text occasionally, but never had managed to meet up. Then working with Charli on the management side, The 1975 played at the O2 [arena] last January, and Charli [said]: ‘Oh you should DJ the after party’, and I was like, ‘I don’t know about that…’ – but I did end up doing it, and that was where we met for the first time in person.
“We kept in touch, and I think he’d been wanting to do this electronic subsidiary for a long time. [When] him and Ed [Blow, label owner] had just got off the phone saying, ‘Right we’re actually gonna do it’, apparently my management reached out, honestly minutes later, saying ‘Hey we’re looking for Kelly to be signed, we’re thinking maybe Dirty Hit’. I didn’t know that until recently. Talk about serendipitous moments!
“The whole label and team I have around me now, it feels like family. We’re all on the same page, and [are a] community, and that’s really important to me.”
‘Dreamstate’ will be released on October 18 via dh2, before a UK and European headline tour kicks off on October 29. Visit here for tickets and more information.