6 Music Festival: Kelly Lee Owens at Band on the Wall

Following her fourth album Dreamstate and the more recent club-focused EP Kelly, Kelly Lee Owens brings her dreampoppy electronica to Band on the Wall as part of this year’s BBC Radio 6 Music Festival.

Owens has forged an interesting path. Growing up in Wales as an indie kid, she spent her teenage years road-tripping around the country to see as much live music as possible. After being told by career advisers that music was nice but offered few prospects, she moved to Manchester and became an auxiliary nurse in a cancer ward – while spending her holidays selling merch for Foals, The Maccabees and Friendly Fires and playing bass in shoegaze band The History of Apple Pie.

Her musical world shifted when she landed an internship at XL Recordings in London, later working at the dance label and record store Pure Groove. Surrounded by colleagues who moonlighted as DJs and producers – among them Daniel Avery, Gold Panda and Ghost Culture – Owens soon found herself stepping behind the controls too, gradually shifting from indie kid to raver.

Cutting her teeth as a co-writer and vocalist on Avery’s Drone Logic, Owens’ 2017 self-titled album blended introspective songwriting with body-moving beats, somewhere between the shimmer of Cocteau Twins and elegant acid-dusted techno. It led to collaborations with St. Vincent, Björk and Jon Hopkins, alongside further acclaimed records including Inner Song (2020) and LP.8 (2022).

That path continued with 2024’s Dreamstate, which documented inner evolution through a blend of glittering techno and lush dreampop. More recently she has distilled those ideas into a leaner, more club-driven form on the EP Kelly – a four-track release she described as both “a snapshot in time” of where she is artistically and a “sonic club journey”. Shaped by the physical spaces and communities that form around dance music, the EP pushes more directly towards the dancefloor with a rawer, more urgent energy.

Running through everything Owens releases is a feeling of escapism, healing and freedom. Dreamstate is full of it, while Kelly sharpens that impulse into something more collective – music made not just for solitary listening but for bodies in motion.

Also on the bill is Wesley Joseph, the Walsall-born, London-based singer, producer and filmmaker whose work sits somewhere between alternative R&B, rap and electronic experimentation. His long-awaited debut album Forever Ends Someday follows acclaimed projects like Ultramarine and Glow, with a cinematic sound that moves fluidly between poetic rap, soul-inflected vocals and textured production.

With Owens pushing deeper into the communal rush of the dancefloor and Joseph bringing his own cinematic blend of soul, rap and electronics, the pairing neatly reflects the wide musical orbit that the BBC Radio 6 Music Festival likes to occupy – two artists approaching electronic music from different angles, meeting in one of Manchester’s best intimate venues.