In an unassuming garden shed, Erin LeCount is crafting renaissance orchestras from plastic keyboards and computers. It’s a duality captured at the heart of her new EP ‘I Am Digital, I Am Divine’ – a collection that explores what it means to feel simultaneously mechanical and transcendent. The juxtaposition of synthetic tools creating deeply organic, almost spiritual sounds mirrors LeCount’s own artistic journey, where technology and emotion intertwine in unexpected ways.
At just 21, LeCount has already lived several musical lives. Her journey began with an innocently misunderstood Duffy cover someone broke out at a Hopton caravan park talent show. “I didn’t know it was a cover, I thought she’d written it and that she was a genius,” she recalls. “I started singing out the caravan windows and pissing everyone off. I realised that you could write songs and they weren’t just for adults.” That early spark, combined with her father’s love of Daft Punk and her own appreciation for Florence + the Machine, set her on her way.
The path from caravan park performances to crafting intricate electronic compositions wasn’t a straight line. By age nine, she was performing at open mics in Essex pubs, though as she notes, “I wasn’t really aware though, and not really consciously thinking about putting myself ‘out there’.” Under the guidance of her primary school music teacher, Peter, who owned The Hermit Club in Brentwood, she immersed herself in live music every weekend. “We’d practice every Saturday in a band, learning instruments and covering songs we liked,” she remembers. “I made silly amounts of money busking as a kid.” These formative experiences provided an education in performance that few could match.
At twelve, she was scouted for The Voice Kids, an experience that fundamentally altered her relationship with music. “I’d never had singing lessons; I’d never really wondered or questioned if I was a good singer or not. I just did it without thinking – it was fun, it was intuitive,” she explains. “Suddenly you’re surrounded by kids that starred on the West End, kids younger than you that are classically trained, and you’re suddenly being analysed and coached on how you sing, dissected on how you pronounce your words. I realised that it’s a sport and an art.”
That realisation came with a cost, but LeCount maintains a philosophical perspective: “I have opinions about it all, but I am a firm believer in sliding doors and that there’s something fateful about everything you experience, so I’d never take it back.” This early exposure to the industry’s more clinical aspects would later inform her approach to creative authenticity.
Now, nearly a decade later, she’s emerged with ‘I Am Digital, I Am Divine’, an EP that grapples with the complexities of human emotion through the lens of technology and spirituality. “It’s about feeling inherently dysfunctional as a person, like you’re a machine with a fault in your code or a piece of art, like a statue that has come to life and can feel everything in a way you’re not supposed to,” she explains. The collection emerged from a period of emotional hibernation and subsequent awakening. “A few years ago, I was quite unwell and dealing with a lot at once that I felt like all my emotions shut down for a good amount of time. When my life eventually started to open up again, I felt like I was a child experiencing every emotion for the first time, to its fullest extent, and that’s documented in a lot of these songs.”
The EP’s creation process mirrors its themes, spanning from meticulously crafted compositions to raw impassioned outbursts. Take ‘Marble Arch’, which LeCount describes as “the longest labour of love I’ve ever made,” contrasting sharply with ‘Silver Spoon’, written and recorded in a single day. “The processes couldn’t fit the songs better, honestly,” she reflects. “‘Marble Arch’ was this long agonising perfectionist process that I had a longstanding relationship with. I knew it was going to be a centrepiece and I obsessed over it. It was like chipping away at a statue or art piece; it was so fragile.”
‘Silver Spoon’ represents the opposite end of the spectrum – “so much messier and erratic, and it was an outburst of emotion, like losing control and saying something in an argument in the heat of the moment that you can’t really take back.” The track’s success has surprised her, though perhaps it shouldn’t have. She notes, “I think it’s probably quite nice for people to hear the things they can’t admit to themselves or others in a song. Makes them feel like they’re not bad, kind of alchemises something.”
The EP also includes ‘Sweet Fruit’, which LeCount initially considered too personal to release. “It felt so pathetic to me; half the lyrics are ‘I need someone’, and that’s something I’ve never leaned into in a song,” she admits. The title track serves as both introduction and context – “emotional, post-breakup, feeling free in a strange way, a few screws loose. It embodied the chaos.”
Each track on the EP represents a different facet of emotional dysfunction. “‘Silver Spoon’ and ‘Marble Arch’ are two very different versions of feeling like there’s something very wrong with you,” she explains. “Feelings of resentment, performances of trying to be perfect, even if it’s self-sacrificial and you hate yourself and other people for it. The whole EP covers this spectrum of feeling dysfunctional as a person.”
Between recording sessions, LeCount maintains an eclectic set of interests. “I’m an avid car boot sale enjoyer – every Sunday like church, and not even the sexy London vintage kind, I’m talking local mums trying to get rid of their old night-out clothes,” she shares. “I like dance; I’d like to go back to dance lessons. I run a lot, and I lift weights; I’m quite strong.”
Looking ahead, she’s careful not to let recent success dictate her future direction. “I think I make good things when I’m not thinking about who’s listening,” she says. “Getting praise for something you make is lovely, but I’m very afraid of being redundant and safe in trying to recreate that same response over and over again.” She’s currently in what she describes as “a processing phase,” working on “the kind of things I’d dreamt of doing but didn’t think would happen for many years.”
As these digital-organic hybrids prepare for their live debut, LeCount continues walking the tightrope between precision and chaos – making music that sounds like how being human feels.
Erin LeCount’s EP’ I Am Digital, I Am Divine’ is out 23rd April.
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