British singer/songwriter Martin Luke Brown makes avoidance sound dangerously beautiful on “dream state,” a hazy, soulful indie pop reverie from his defiantly alive third album ‘life & death etc’ that floats on loose grooves, golden harmonies, and the bittersweet thrill of running from pain before finally choosing to feel it. In conversation with Atwood Magazine, Brown opens up about making music that feels alive in the room – tracing how friendship, grief, humor, curiosity, and everyday moments helped shape his most open-hearted record yet.

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Stream: “dream state” – Martin Luke Brown

Floating can feel like freedom until you realize you’ve been running the whole time.

Weightless and gently euphoric, Martin Luke Brown’s “dream state” feels exactly like its title: Soft ground beneath your feet, sunlight through closed eyes, the sweet little lift of a song that seems to float before it ever lands. It glows in that dangerous sweetness – the glistening haze of running from pain until escape becomes its own kind of trap. Released in May as an early single from his third album life & death etc, “dream state” is warm, lush, and irresistibly buoyant – a seductive indie pop reverie that shines like heat on your face and fog in your lungs. Loose grooves, slacker guitar, golden harmonies, and Brown’s tender, open-hearted vocal carry the song upward until the refrain becomes a sort of suspended surrender: “Stuck in my dream state somewhere / in California wasting away / one day I have to face it / but not today.”

It’s gorgeous because it floats; it aches because it knows floating is not the same thing as being free.

There’s a cloud in my head
A lump in my throat
A pain in my body
It wants me to know
That all of my problems
I never solve them
I just run away

Fear is a feeling
Denial is a place
I left the country
I needed to break
Filled my lungs with smoke
Found me a telescope
You know how I need my…
SPACE!

Over the past decade, Martin Luke Brown has built one of UK songwriting’s richest and most emotionally agile catalogs, both as a solo artist and as a founding member of FIZZ alongside Orla Gartland, dodie, and Greta Isaac. His 2023 debut album damn, look at the view ! marked what he calls “the TRUE beginning” of his project, the place where he finally felt he found his voice; last year’s man oh man ! explored masculinity, friendship, closure, and new beginnings through a hazy emotional lens that still feels deeply true to that moment in his life.

“It sounds like that time in my life which is all I could ask for really given my project is always aiming to be a time capsule,” Brown tells Atwood Magazine. “It’s such a stoner record and I was definitely in that sort of space literally and emotionally. It was an insanely emotional time and I just wrote my way through it in this sort of hazy confused way. It sounds like my truth at the time and that’s probably why I’m still proud of it.”

Brown’s time-capsule instinct carries into life & death etc, out now via Bright Antenna Records, but the emotional temperature has changed.

If Brown’s first record feels, in his words, “naïve and cute,” and his second sounds like “the breaking down of that youthful optimism,” the new album brings those two energies into contact: Lit by the wisdom of someone who has had to move through the dark to find the party.

“It’s celebratory but in a defiant, ‘I’ve been through some shit to get here’ sort of way,” he explains. “It’s much more chaotic and alive in a way I hope is as enjoyable for the listener as it was for me making it.” Written and produced with longtime collaborator Matt Zara, the record turns toward what Brown calls “the beautiful middle ground” between life, death, and everything else – fleeting conversations, hazy nights, emotional collisions, small ordinary moments that somehow become the whole point.

“dream state” is the bridge into that release. The song begins with the body trying to speak through symptoms – “There’s a cloud in my head, a lump in my throat, a pain in my body, it wants me to know” – before Brown admits the pattern with devastating plainness: “That all of my problems, I never solve them, I just run away.” The music makes that running feel urgent at first, all soft-focus glow and dream-lifted motion, but the lyrics keep tugging the listener back toward the ache beneath the haze. Fear becomes a feeling, denial becomes a place, California becomes an imagined escape route, and the chorus turns procrastinated pain into one of the album’s most irresistible hooks. “One day I have to face it, but not today” lands like a joke, a confession, and a survival strategy all at once.

Stuck in my dream state somewhere
In California wasting away
One day I have to face it
But not today

Stuck in my dream state somewhere
I’m sat on board a familiar train
One day I have to face it
But not today
Ooooooh…

“It felt like the perfect bridge between the last project and this one,” Brown says.

“It starts off kind of hazy and stonery and then grows into this wide-open expanse of harmonies and key changes and says ‘feel it’ about 20 times. The rest of the album is me FEELING IT, you know?”

“It’s all about the perils of avoidance!” he muses. “It’s about a time where I was literally running away from pain, both physically and mentally. In the context of the album, this song is the moment where the emotional drain begins to unblock, and the fog starts to clear, and it starts to become a big celebration of emotion rather than a turgid wallowing in repression.”

This celebration arrives gradually, then all at once. “dream state” may begin as a cloud-walk, but by its bridge, the song has started shaking itself awake: “Boy you don’t have to be dyin’ all the time / yeah you got your life / so live it.” The refrain that follows – “There’s a feeling there / SO FEEL IT!” – is the whole song cracking open, avoidance giving way to sensation, numbness giving way to appetite. Brown has described life & death etc as a record about being here, fully and messily, and “dream state” captures the moment that philosophy stops being an idea and becomes a bodily command. It does not shame the dreamer for drifting; it simply insists that life is waiting outside the fog.

“‘Feel it’ is the key part,” Brown explains. “Most of the song is talking about how I was so numb for so long. I think you die a lot of deaths while you’re alive – you grieve and you open and close chapters. But I think one of the biggest deaths is a life lived without embracing emotion. It’s like, the whole point of life? To experience and f***ing BEING here. That’s how I see it, anyway.”

Now that life & death etc has arrived in full, “dream state” feels less like a standalone escape fantasy than the record’s threshold:

The moment the fog starts to clear before Brown plunges into the messy, funny, brutal, beautiful work of being present.

Across twelve songs, the album keeps its title’s promise without turning life and death into grand abstractions. Brown writes about everything in between – friendship, love, grief, food on the table, nights out, old rooms, lost people, good kisses, dumb jokes, small routines, and the ordinary flashes that become sacred only after they’ve passed.

That range gives the album its pulse. The opening “it’s all gonna be fine !” cracks open with anxious optimism, all nerves and motion, while “nonetheless” turns heartbreak into a bruised grin: The body gets knocked around, but the heart keeps beating anyway. “aching for everyone” stretches the record toward what Brown calls “existential, insatiable yearning,” mourning imagined lives and vanished people even in the middle of a milestone moment. “highest high,” meanwhile, is the record at its most open-chested, a song Brown describes as being about “deep f***ing love” and the messy gratitude of looking back on an ending without letting it harden into bitterness.

The album’s power lies in that refusal to split grief and joy into separate rooms.

Brown’s songs keep finding humor in pain and weight inside lightness, the person cracking jokes at a funeral because sometimes laughter is the only way the body knows how to stay in the room. “It feels innately human to seamlessly straddle the line between grief and joy,” he says elsewhere of the record, and life & death etc keeps returning to that line with a strange, generous brightness. It knows that moving forward does not mean forgetting. It knows that being well is not the same thing as being untouched.

By the time life & death etc closes with “unlearning everything,” Brown has widened the album from avoidance into curiosity. The record’s final stretch reaches for childlike wonder without pretending innocence can be recovered cleanly. It’s less about going backward than stripping away the habits that kept feeling locked behind the teeth: The stoicism, the numbness, the tidy performance of being fine.

In that light, “dream state” becomes one of the album’s essential hinges. It’s the song where running out of the body starts to give way to returning to it.

Brown’s commitment to presence also shapes the album’s sound.

Where previous records sometimes felt like private weather systems, life & death etc leans into collaboration, ceremony, and community as creative fuel. Written and produced with longtime collaborator Matt Zara, the record expands Brown’s indie-soul palette into janky, tender, slightly psychedelic territory, with flashes of classic pop, cracked country, and loose-limbed studio joy. It sounds made by people who were happy to be in a room together, which matters because the record’s whole argument depends on that charge: More people, more life.

“My main motive is to be as collaborative and community orientated as possible,” Brown says. “I think music is meant to be ceremonious. I’m trying to make music that feels ALIVE and I find that infinitely easier when there’s more people involved. More people equals more life.”

Brown’s people-first philosophy has now spilled beyond the album itself. His accompanying Middle Farm Studios short film turns four life & death etc songs into one continuous, joyfully imperfect live-session journey through the studio and its surroundings – outside, kitchen, control room, live room, hallway, and eventually up a hill, chasing the kind of looseness that can only happen when everyone leaves room for surprise. It’s not just a promo piece; it’s an extension of the record’s worldview. The songs matter, but so do the people moving around them. So do the accidents. So does the pleasure of catching a moment while it’s still warm.

“I hope they just have a nice time making breakfast or going for a walk or having a barbecue with friends or some shit,” he adds. “Whatever really. It’d be nice for it to provide some vibe to the highlight reels of people’s lives… I think that stuff is minor, but it’s an unbelievable privilege. It’s spiritual! To play a part in those little moments would be lovely.”

This is the magic of “dream state,” and the larger invitation of life & death etc: Brown transforms avoidance into presence without pretending the fog never existed.

He doesn’t deny the ache, the numbness, the grief, or the urge to disappear somewhere beautiful for a while; he writes through them until the music becomes a hand reaching back toward the body. Soft, sweet, glistening, and buoyant, “dream state” still feels like walking on a cloud just as the sky begins to clear – but inside the album, that clearing opens into something even richer: a celebration of emotion, community, curiosity, and the ridiculous privilege of being here long enough to feel it all.

Atwood Magazine caught up with Martin Luke Brown to step inside the world of life & death etc – a record of hazy escape routes, deep feeling, small pleasures, friendship, grief, and songs made to soundtrack the everyday moments that make a life. Dive into our conversation below, and let “dream state” remind you that one day we have to face it – but maybe facing it is where the real aliveness begins.

After all, floating only means something if, eventually, you let yourself land.

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:: stream/purchase life & death etc here ::

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life & death etc – Martin Luke Brown

A CONVERSATION WITH MARTIN LUKE BROWN

Martin Luke Brown: That I’m incredibly special and unique and worth caring about, hahah!

Martin Luke Brown: Sure! I think “damn, look at the view !” is a good place to begin. That feels like the TRUE beginning of my project where i finally felt like I found my voice. It took a LOT to be able to make that, it feels profound. Then probably “back 2 ya” from the man oh man ! album – that’s right on the other end of the spectrum emotionally, just joyful and silly. I think most of my shit sits somewhere in-between incredibly deep and incredibly nonchalant – I’m aiming for both at same time most of the time.

Martin Luke Brown: Yeah, I’m really proud of it still. It sounds like that time in my life which is all I could ask for really given my project is always aiming to be a time capsule. It’s such a stoner record and I was definitely in that sort of space literally and emotionally. It was an insanely emotional time and I just wrote my way through it in this sort of hazy confused way. It sounds like my truth at the time, and that’s probably why I’m still proud of it.

Martin Luke Brown: I grew up on classic shit like The Beatles and Motown records, mainly Stevie Wonder – I’d say they’re my north stars, but they’re not really. They’re their own insanely accomplished things and completely unique and inimitable. I just want to find what feels like the most potent version of my own voice and that can only really be discovered by constantly looking inward I think, or outward but only as far as my community and the roles I find myself playing within them.

Martin Luke Brown: The first record feels naive and cute, the second feels like the breaking down of that youthful optimism, and this one feels like a combination of the two. It’s celebratory but in a defiant, “I’ve been through some shit to get here”-sort of way. It’s much more chaotic and alive in a way I hope is as enjoyable for the listener as it was for me making it.

Martin Luke Brown: It felt like the perfect bridge between the last project and this one. It starts off kind of hazy and stonery and then grows into this wide-open expanse of harmonies and key changes and says ‘feel it’ about 20 times. The rest of the album is me FEELING IT. You know??

Martin Luke Brown: ‘feel it’ is the key part. Most of the song is talking about how I was so numb for so long. I think you die a lot of deaths while you’re alive – you grieve and you open and close chapters. But I think one of the biggest deaths is a life lived without embracing emotion. It’s like, the whole point of life?? To experience and f***ing BEING here. That’s how I see it, anyway.

Martin Luke Brown: My main motive is to be as collaborative and community orientated as possible. I think music is meant to be ceremonious. I’m trying to make music that feels ALIVE, and I find that infinitely easier when there’s more people involved. More people = more life. That’s the main motive at the moment, anyway. There may well come a time when I have a more introverted moment but for now that’s what’s fueling the tank.

Martin Luke Brown: I hope they just have a nice f***in’ time making breakfast or going for a walk or having a barbecue with friends or some shit. Whatever really. It’d be nice for it to provide some vibe to the highlight reels of people’s lives. I always think how my life would be different if I was a billionaire on a day off – and honestly I’d just go for a walk, have a coffee or food with some friends. I think that shit is minor, but it’s an unbelievable privilege. It’s spiritual! To play a part in those little moments would be lovely.

Martin Luke Brown: I’m really f***ing with a band called sword II. Also dolly parton’s back catalogue. Kurt vile’s new record, too. There is so much good music out there

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:: connect with Martin Luke Brown here ::

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Stream: “dream state” – Martin Luke Brown

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