• News

• All

Jun 24, 2020 By Christopher Roberts Photography by Kim Hiorthøy Kelly Lee Owens

British electronic music artist/producer Kelly Lee Owens is releasing a new album, Inner Song, on August 28 via Smalltown Supersound. Now she has shared another song from it, “On,” via a video for the track. Kasper Häggström directed the video, which was filmed on the Norwegian coastline and features a man and his dog (Owens isn’t in the video). Häggström previously directed Owens’ “Throwing Lines” video from her first album. Watch the “On” video below.

Owens had this to say about the song in a press release: “This is perhaps the most intimate and personal song I’ve written so far—the two halves of the track reflect upon sad acceptances of the truth and then the joyous aftermath of liberation that can come from that. This can definitely be heard in the production and arrangement of the track—the first half sonically connecting to the inner revelations and the second half, the liberation in action, the forward motion.”

Inner Song was due out May 1, but has since been pushed back due to COVID-19. Previously Owens shared its first single, “Melt!,” via a video for the new song. Then she shared its second single, the hypnotic “Night,” which was on of our Songs of the Week.

Inner Song is the follow-up to Owens’ self-titled debut album, released in 2017 via Smalltown Supersound (it was one of our Top 100 Albums of 2017). In May 2019 Owens shared two new songs, “Let It Go” and “Omen,” with “Let It Go” making our Songs of the Week list. Neither song is on the new album. In December 2019 Owens teamed up with Jon Hopkins for the seven-minute long new song, “Luminous Spaces.” It was originally intended to be an Owens remix of Hopkins’ “Luminous Beings” but morphed into its own thing once the pair got into the studio together. “Luminous Spaces” was #1 on our Songs of the Week list and is also not featured on Inner Song.

Inner Song opens with a cover of Radiohead’s “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi,” from 2007’s In Rainbows, but Owens’ version is just titled “Arpeggi.” One song on the album features vocals from John Cale.

In a previous press release, Owens said creating Inner Song was “the hardest three years of my life…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.”

The album’s title is borrowed from Alan Silva’s free jazz album of the same name from 1972. Owens said the title “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.”

“Melt!” is inspired by the climate change crisis. “I wanted to create something that sounded hard but with organic samples,” Owens said. “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.”

Read our 2017 interview with Kelly Lee Owens.

Support Under the Radar on Patreon.