Kelly Lee Owens Announces Second Album, Shares Visual for New Track “Melt!”

Welsh producer Kelly Lee Owens has been busy on the heels of her debut self-titled album. A veritable remix go-to, Owens was among the first to remix St. Vincent’s now chopped, screwed, cut and extended MASSEDUCTION track “New York,” and contributed a version of “Arisen My Senses” to Björk’s remix EP for Utopia. Back in December, she shared a single featuring Jon Hopkins titled “Luminous Spaces.” She’s quickly codifying her own niche of techno, from the hazy, spiritual Jenny Hval-featuring “Anxi.” to her genre-bending, trunk-thumping cover of Aaliyah’s “More Than a Woman,” Owens enjoys flirting with pop culture and bringing a new, psychedelic spin to electronic pop.

Tuesday, Owens announced her forthcoming second album Inner Song and shared a visual for lead single “Melt!” The track is propulsive and essentially techno, with sensual vocal sampling and a sweaty, danceable rhythm. The video depicts several erotic segments with glitchy, glacial filtering atop them, as if the models depicted are rapidly sublimating. It immediately calls into question, much like Grimes’ recent Miss_Anthropocene, our current climate crisis. This is intentional on Owens’ part: “I wanted to create something that sounded hard but with organic samples. I felt those were great representations of what’s happening in the world, that every moment you’re breathing and sleeping, this is ?taking place,” she says. It shows—the track feels like the sounding of a siren, surging with urgency as if hovering just above all-out panic.

Of the album, Owens says she looked inward for inspiration: “My creative life and everything I’d worked for up to that point was deeply impacted. I wasn’t sure if I could make anything anymore, and it took quite a lot of courage to get to a point where I could create again.” She notes the album’s title is a reference to Alan Silva’s 1972 piece of the same name, saying it “really reflects what it felt like to make this record. I did a lot of inner work in the past few years, and this is a true reflection of that.”

You can check out the video for “Melt!” below, as well as the details of the album and Owens’ tour dates. Inner Song will be out on May 1 via Smalltown Supersound.

Inner Song Album Art:

Inner Song Tracklist
01. Arpeggi
02. On
03. Melt!
04. Re-Wild
05. Jeanette
06. L.I.N.E.
07. Corner Of My Sky
08. Night
09. Flow
10. Wake-Up

Kelly Lee Owens Tour Dates:

February
28 – London, U.K. @ Southbank Centre (DJ)
29 – Milan, Italy @ Contemporary Art Pavillion (DJ)

March
06 – London, U.K @ 6 Music Festival (DJ)
07 – Graz, Austria @ Elevate Festival (DJ)
21 – Istanbul, Turkey @ Babylon (DJ)
27 – Rome, Italy @ Manifesto Festival (DJ)

May
06 – Brighton, U.K @ Patterns – Warm Up Show
08 – Manchester, U.K @ YES – Warm Up Show
09 – Berlin, Germany @ Pitchfork Music Festival
13 – London, U.K @ Rough Trade East
23 – London, U.K @ All Points East Festival

June
14 – Dhërmi, Albania @ Kala Festival
27 – Perk, Belgium @ Paradise City Festival

July
10 – Bilbao, Spain @ BBK Live Festival
30 – Amsterdam, Netherlands @ Dekmantel Festival