Erin LeCount on Pareidolia, New Single Alice and Heated Rivalry Edits

Rising pop singer Erin LeCount says she’s always expressed herself best through music.

The British performer — who released her latest EP Pareidolia Feb. 27 — says she fell in love with music at a young age thanks to a teacher who sparked her interest. She was eventually scouted for The Voice Kids in the U.K., finishing as a runner-up in season 1 after making it to the finale.

“I had no idea what I was doing,” she tells The Hollywood Reporter on a Zoom, recalling the imposter syndrome she felt going into the program with no formal training. By 17, she found musical production and “totally fell in love.”

Now, at 23, LeCount is finding her stride, having just wrapped her first U.S. tour. She showed off a commanding stage presence during a pair of Valentine’s Day weekend shows at the Roxy in West Hollywood. Dressed in etherial white to match her long white blond hair, she directs the audience to belt out a note so she can record it. LeCount — who produces all of her music onstage — makes that note the beat for her next song.

Pareidolia, her latest release, is the singer’s exploration of a downward spiral. The word itself, she points out, means finding patterns in places there aren’t — it’s a theme that runs throughout the album.

Below, LeCount breaks down Pareidolia, shares on the “beautiful” connection between her song “Silver Spoon” and Heated Rivalry, and her passion for giving young women a space to hysterical.

The production element seems important to you. Why has it been so important to you that you produce your own music?

There’s so much misogyny that exists around female artists, and then a whole added layer of that when it comes to female artists who want ownership over their work or production. For me, it came because when I was working with other people, I was just so incredibly insecure and had so much imposter syndrome. I didn’t know how to not freeze up in a room with other people. I started doing sessions when I was about 17. You’re in rooms with people, all male, a lot older than you, and that… Everyone was lovely and everyone was kind, and I didn’t have any bad experiences, but it wasn’t something I felt able to open up in.

I really felt this need to understand what was happening, and the idea of someone else being at the driving seat of my music and not understanding what was happening, I couldn’t get my head around that. I just tried to learn the language of production and the basics to communicate what I wanted. It ended up being that once I was in that rabbit hole, I fell in love with it. My brain latches onto the process of production so well. I lose hours to it, and it’s just something inherent to the music now. I’m so open to collaboration, and I’ve become more comfortable with that, but I get to what I want to say better and more truthfully when it’s just me in the beginning. There’s no room to be swayed by any external influences or impressions.

Have you always been someone who feels they’re more able to express themselves better through music?

Writing is where I figure out everything about myself that I need to be self-aware of. It’s so telling and a lot of the time making music is… When you’re in this flow state, especially being at computer and production, that’s where I hit into it. When my brain is switching between this flow between writing the song and being at the computer and your hands moving. You often reveal things to yourself that you were not aware of before that moment, and that is how I work through everything in my life.

For better or worse, that comes out really honestly in the music, and I do struggle to filter that. It’s just coming from this subconscious place, and then all of a sudden it’s on paper or it’s recorded on a screen. When I play it back, it’s almost like having, I don’t know, your therapy notes read to you or something. It’s like an untangling of thoughts. It’s all incredibly personal, but I don’t really know how else to write. It’s been a communication to other people, but it’s also been a method of understanding myself and how my mind works. I’m pretty on the go all the time. I don’t stop to think about things until I sit down, and I’m at the computer and that’s the only quiet reflection time I have.

As a writer in a different way, I can understand that.

It’s all the same. It really is all the same. I [had always] wanted to be a writer, whether that was novels or journalism. That’s where the biggest revelations come about.

Can you tell me more about some of your recent songs? Let’s start with “I Believe.”

“I Believe” is the first track on this EP. It was a song when I felt really existential about what purpose is and the meaning that I apply to things. I write a lot about God for someone who’s not sure what they believe in, it’s a really ongoing theme.

I have noticed that.

I just keep writing as a method of untangling and that’s just a very long string to pull. It never ends. “I Believe” was questioning my identity and who I am, and how I compartmentalize all these pieces of myself and really wanting to believe in something bigger. A plan to feel that comfort. This cynicism about the whole thing. It was just a big question mark really. I think that was the perfect opening because it just opens up this entire conversation of what is my purpose? I’m going to go out and look for it.

What about “Don’t You See Me Trying?”

[It’s the] second song of the EP; they flow directly into each other because “Don’t You See Me Trying” is about feeling out of control in your life and reverting back to old habits and self-destructive patterns because it’s the only thing you do feel you have control over. I think there’s a real theme of questioning yourself and feeling small in the grand scheme of things. Just clutching at straws to try and control what you can. The movement from “I Believe” — and [questioning] what my purpose is — and “Don’t You See Me Trying” being [about], “I don’t have one and I’m losing my mind about it, and I’m going to find a drive even if that’s a really poisonous, scary, self-destructive thing.”

What does this album mean to you? It sounds like you’re working through a lot of existential things, which is quite relatable to anyone who’s been 23.

I knew that I wanted to make an EP about all these different stages of a downward spiral, sort of a relapse or regression of some sort. There’s slow progression of losing your perspective and beginning to see lies in yourself through a really distorted lens. [The] pushing and pulling with that. It’s something I’ve lived really vicariously through. Making this EP was like acting out all those self-destructive tendencies through the music rather than engaging with them personally. I’ve been down and lived the sequence of events in the EP so many times, and I think I just wanted to make something productive from it. Something that felt cathartic and something that had all that impulse and that, sort of, recklessness.

Pareidolia, the word, is about a tendency to perceive meaningful patterns between things that aren’t related, like shapes and clouds or a face in the moon. It was just the perfect word to sum up what our brains do when we don’t understand something or feel out of control of something or can’t perceive things correctly. We just go back to the patterns that we know and we try and make them fit and try; associate them with something new.

One track that really stuck out to me was “Alice.” I thought that was a really interesting take. In a not crass way, no matter what your vice of choice is, someone who enables that behavior, even just by being there, is a really relatable idea.

“Alice” is the last track on the EP because it is a bit of a gut punch, even for me to sing live. I didn’t realize how much it was until it came to touring. It’s about a person; it’s also about yourself, it’s about myself. Sometimes there’s a relationship that brings up all the things about yourself that you don’t like, and you see them reflected in another person right back at you. When you struggle with the same thing, there’s this intense bond that happens that feels like nobody else in the world could possibly understand. Sometimes that is the worst person for you to be around. That’s incredibly difficult. When I wrote that song, that feeling — of you two being the only people in the world who deal with it — sticks with you for a very long time.

How did the song help you work through things?

Writing that song took a really long time because it was hard to get an accurate and fair portrayal of both the people in that scenario. You’re navigating your relationship to each other, but you’re also navigating the relationship you have to your vices and yourself. For that all to be reflected in one person, for one person to bring that all out in you, is an incredibly scary and confronting experience.

For a long time, it was a version of the song that blamed her entirely, and then it was a version that blamed me entirely. Then it was all about me and nothing about her. Other times it was too focused on the love between us and not enough on the vices that we both had that got in the way. It was a really complex song to navigate, but it’s a complex scenario to navigate. It’s far more universal than people think it is.

Social media has obviously played a large part in helping you find a community. Your song “Silver Spoon” had this second wind because Heated Rivalry fans were making edits to it.

It came so out of the blue. You make a song, and you selfishly think “this is so specific to me and only applicable to me.” It was the first time that instantly that was revealed to me as not true, and that it was universal in people’s lives and shows and films that people really resonated with and saw themselves in. It was really beautiful for me because I found so much of the music that I loved in the age of Tumblr to fandom edits of different shows and movies that I loved.

Those edits, they take time, and they’re incredibly valuable. There are fandoms that are the reason that people found my song and found communities around it. It then led people to retrospectively go back on my work and other things I’d shared, and come forward with me and listen to the music that was coming after that. To see yourself reflected in music, to see your situation represented in shows is so important and incredibly comforting.

When I was at your show, I was behind a group of passionate teen fans. It reminded me why I love music. What’s it like to see that for you?

It’s so incredibly rewarding. Nobody rides harder or feels more intensely about things than teens or people in their mid-20s. That’s really the demographic that have been showing up for me at shows and across the board. I’ve met some of the most passionate, creative people who just make worlds of their own with the songs and what I give them. They just expand on it, creatively and within their own communities and building friendships around it. I just think there’s not enough spaces where young women and teens are encouraged to be that hysterical in the best way.

When you have all that built up emotion and all these shared experiences, to be at a show and to be facilitating a space where people are able to feel that amongst each other and with their friends and release that is so important because I think “where else does it go if it doesn’t go here?” I was always incredibly cynical about showing love or passion or the hysteria that fan girls get mocked for sometimes. I wish I’d had a space like that, and I wish I’d opened myself up to that community of people who feel similarly to me. I see myself in when I was younger. It would’ve probably saved me a lot of feelings of loneliness, which is a lot of what I sing about.

I could talk your ear off about teen girls making people’s careers and getting no respect for being tastemakers in music.

They are the tastemakers, the dictators. They are pop culture, and they are what all these labels and businesses thrive off. What a lot of people profit off. They should be rewarded and respected and shown love and appreciation in return for that.