DAYDREAM BELIEVER

Welsh techno-pop artist Kelly Lee Owens is the first signing to Dirty Hit's new dance label, dh2. She talks "transcending my bullshit" on the euphoric, thumping club tunes of fourth album, Dreamstate

- WILL RICHARDS

'Mission aplomplished," a young child gleefully exclaims at the very end of Kelly Lee Owens' new album, Dreamstate. It's the voice of two-year-old River, the child of Owens' collaborator Oli Bayston, delightfully botching a rendition of his favourite catchphrase. For the Welsh producer, it captured the childlike wonder she wanted to inhabit on her fourth album.

Dreamstate will be the first full-length album released on dh2, the new dance-orientated imprint of Dirty Hit and brainchild of The 1975's George Daniel. Owens had carved out a space between the dingy thud of techno and melodic transcendence of pop on her 2020 album, Inner Song, but the new record stretches her further in both directions, and also towards naked, vulnerable ballads. It's a stunning step up for an artist who is now confidently inhabiting her truth.

While writing the new album, Owens was determined to "make the art that my soul wants to make", ignoring outside influences and following "a path and an energy" that felt like it was coming to her from a higher place. "I always hoped that I'd find a home in a label that would carry that vision through," she says. When she met Daniel in Los Angeles, she asked him, "Do you care about the long term? How much time are you willing to invest in this project? What do you see?"

His response? "George knows that nothing is guaranteed, and even with all his success, there's something humble about him and Dirty Hit," she says. "They're such hard workers, and they care so much about really good music. The process felt genuinely right." Owens was then unveiled as the new label's first signing, and entered a bold and defiant new era.