October 2024 marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of the Surrealist Manifesto, which kicked off a century of art shaped by the subconscious mind. But even without that historic spur, this year was already setting out to be one for the dreamers. From a spate of excellent hypnagogic releases to the popularity of hit em, a genre that quite literally came to the public in the form of a dream, there’s been an undeniable appetite for music that taps into the gauzy edge of the listener’s focus and transports them somewhere else entirely. All of which is to say, it’s an excellent time for a new Kelly Lee Owens album.
The Welsh singer and producer has spent her career toggling between levels of definition, easing and sharpening her focus to capture dream states with varying degrees of lucidity. Her self-titled debut and 2020’s Inner Song fused the weightlessness of dream pop with techno’s mechanical heft, leveraging the former’s vaporous uplift and the latter’s cold circuitry to create music that soared and pulsed in equal measure. Owens cleared the air on 2022’s LP.8, setting fire to her music’s atmosphere by replacing its pillowy reverb with noisy distortion. On songs like “Release” and “Anadlu,” she switched up her voice from a caress into a command, becoming the strict but familiarizing counterpoint to the instrumental violence she summoned. Contrary to what its title might suggest, Dreamstate is not a return to the mistiness of her early records but her most total refinement to date, stripping her sound to its most essential parts while preserving its mesmerizing edge.
The newfound clarity throughout much of Dreamstate means that you can better appreciate the contours of Owens’ rhythmic muscle, the sheer amount of craft that goes into the propulsive thrust of her music. Where soothing drone and blankets of reverb helped cushion the thump of previous tracks, many of the songs on this record are massive and glittering techno behemoths. “Sunshine,” “Dark Angel” and “Air” rise and recede over brilliantly multi-colored synths, gathering and refracting light like skyscrapers against a sunset. The title track is a peak-time banger, a side-winding rave anthem that sounds as if the acid-house climax of Madonna’s “Ray of Light” had been stretched into eternity. On “Love You Got,” Owens deploys a flickering drum machine that subtly nudges the song into motion as she layers jagged bass synths that are only a few hairs short of belonging to a Brazilian funk track.
