Inner Song

Kelly Lee Owens’ masterful second album Inner Song finds the convention-blurring techno producer and singer/songwriter diving deep into her own psyche—excoriating the struggles she’s faced over the last several years and exploring personal pain while embracing the beauty of the natural world. It’s a leap in artistry from a musician who burst forth on the scene with a confident, rich sound, and Inner Song is endlessly enticing when it comes to what Owens is capable of.

Inner Song follows the star-making debut of her 2017 self-titled album, a quixotic blend of body-moving beats and introspective songwriting that garnered numerous accolades from the music press. Owens has indeed come a long way from her background as a nurse, since then she has remixed Bjørk & St Vincent, released an indelibly clubby two-tracker, 2019’s Let It Go b/w Omen and teamed up with like minded auteur Jon Hopkins on the one-off Luminous Spaces.

Her latest album also comes off of what Owens describes as the hardest three years of her life. So while the lovely cover of Radiohead’s Arpeggi might strike some as an unconventional way to open a sophomore effort, to Owens the winding take on the classic tune—recorded a year before work on Inner Song properly kicked off—represents the sort of sonic rebirth that’ s so essential to Inner Song’s aura. Inner Song was largely written and recorded over a month last winter. As with her debut, Owens holed up in the studio with co- producer and collaborator James Greenwood —and letting loose in the studio and being open to whatever sonic whims emerge was essential to Owens’ craftwork. The evocative title of the album is borrowed from free-jazz maestro Alan Silva’s 1972 opus, which was gifted to Owens by Smalltown Supersound’s Joakim Haugland for her 30th birthday.