Escapist alt-pop auteur Erin LeCount presents her latest labyrinthine track "Marble Arch"

After spending childhood nights performing at Open Mics across London, Erin LeCount was scouted for a reality television music contest. As the exhilaration of the whole ordeal waned, the pressure of being thrust into public consciousness waxed and left the then teenage singer overwhelmed and struggling with her identity. “I was so young, and it was all so new and exciting,” LeCount recalls. “It was such a weird time because I suddenly was surrounded by a world of comparison. I’ve spoken to so many of the children, now adults, who went through that with me, and it messed with all of us a little bit... I came out of the show pretty unwell."

LeCount ensures this very same unbridled honesty is sowed into the grain of her music. She continues, “I had to drop out of school. My life got completely swallowed by everything else I had to deal with after. I developed stage fright. It was like my body had just shut down. I genuinely forgot how to sing - I physically couldn’t do it. Performing had always been my favourite part, the one thing I thought I understood the most. And suddenly, it felt impossible.”

Ironically the Covid-19 pandemic ended up being a great reset for the singer, as lockdown allowed time for her to work on her musicianship in the solitude of her own room, teaching herself Logic, and taking complete control over every facet of her artistry. Inspired by contemporary singer-producers like FKA Twigs and Grimes, she approaches her art with a freedom to experiment, and a powerful polish in designing the intensely detailed and intricate, labyrinthine production. Adding a modern, glitch-fulled paradigm to the same baroque warmth and plucky strings of Florence + The Machine's Ceremonials or Caroline Polachek's Pang, LeCount creates art with such a deep reverence and well-balanced concoction of silk and bombast.

Now 22-years-old, LeCount's next EP, I Am Digital, I Am Divine, charts her story reconnecting with herself and other people. “When I was an unwell teenager, I was very isolated and I didn't have much of a social life so I started dating and making friends at 17 and didn’t understand the dynamics,” she says. “It’s given me a lot of missed experiences to experience in a short amount of time and music has been my way to do that." Indeed the latest single from the project, "Marble Arch", employs the metaphor of a Greek statue to convey LeCount's pleas to crack free from her resistant exterior and usher in human warmth and intimacy. Although delicate in its sound, her songwriting delivers full body blows. "If I learn to be happier will I forget how to write songs?" she poses, wondering if she resocialises into a typical twenty-something, will it be at the cost of a part of herself.

Speaking of the track LeCount shares, “‘Marble Arch’ is about all the times I tried to be absolutely perfect. I was so mean and rude, because you’ve just got no energy, no emotion. Striving for perfection actually made me a very cold and unpleasant person to be around.” The lyrics convey how routinely both her physical and emotional being have been used as a cheap currency for entertainment – from "the walls of my heart look like museum corridors" to "this body used to be my home / now it's just an homage / a souvenir I gave to everyone I loved," it is clear how vacant she fears she had become.

The accompanying music video is similarly disconcerting in its quick cuts of different shots of LeCount, adorned in angel wings, sprawled across a modest bedspread and flanked by an array of crucifixes and fuzzy television sets. Although on first glance one may perceive a forlorn, deep-rooted sadness in her eyes, she seems to gain confidence both in her expression and movement by the end of the visual, walking away with a steely resolve. A lineage of great female alt-pop singers have long toyed with ideas of vainglorious iconography and divine symbolism in their music, and LeCount continues the tradition in fresh ways. Whilst she repeats the public declaration "I don't want to be cold anymore" a few times in the track's outro, she barely manages to whisper the last one, which ends up making it the most impactful as if she is personally reassuring herself of her intent.

Building her tracks into certain puzzles and mapping the way out of the mazes through her confessional lyricism, it is ironic that Erin LeCount's path to certain success is far more direct.