INTERVIEW: Erin LeCount on her new EP 'PAREIDOLIA': “I always feel like I could be making more art or better art, and actually, that's a really exciting concept.”
Interview: Shalane Connors
Image: Furmaan Ahmed
Published: 2 September 2026
The UK’s Erin LeCount is widely tipped as the next big global music superstar, and after even just the most cursory listen to her music it is very easy to understand why.
A singer, songwriter, musician, producer and arranger LeCount has full creative control over her music and with her powerful vocals, incredible melodies and diverse soundscape she brings together everything that you love about pop music whilst also making it like nothing else you have heard before. From synth to trip-hop to indie and pop, LeCount ties it all together with her incredibly soulful, emotive vocals.
LeCount first released music in 2022, with her debut EP Soft Skin, Restless Bones dropping the following year. Last year’s single ‘Silver Spoon’ was a breakthrough moment for LeCount, accumulating over 22 million streams on Spotify to date, and in June this year she released her third EP PAREIDOLIA.
While not veering radically from her established soundscape, the EP carries extra gravity and weight in both its production and lyrical content. The single ‘I Believe’ is a case in point. A stirring, baroque-synth-pop song with gorgeous melodies is teamed with a serious story running through the lyrics as LeCount explores apathy, disillusionment and cynicism, plus an increasing need for external validation and being told how to feel: ‘Wait for God to intervene, say, "It just is what it is" / Blame it all on the eclipse, solar systems, politics / But it's the future.’
‘Don’t You See Me Trying?’ follows a similar soundscape as ‘I Believe’ and explores what is perhaps another side of apathy and cynicism - the urge to self sabotage when things go well because you have trained your brain to believe you don’t deserve good things: ‘I'm going back to the wreck / And, God, it feels nice in ways I don't understand.’
’808 Hymn’ introduces an intoxicating electro-house-dance feel to the EP, but the frantic beats aren’t reflective of a night of freedom on the dancefloor, but the anxiety and heightened heartbeat every woman alone at night feels: ‘Grit your teeth, make a scene, put your keys between fists…It's praying you can make it for just five more minutes.’
‘Machine Ghost’ is arguably the most experimental song on the EP, opening with a swooping, juddering synth soundscape, with LeCount’s main vocal intercut with distorted, reverb vocals and an off kilter beat. Lyrically, the song is about becoming disassociated from yourself and your body and the pain that follows: ‘Can someone tell God I should be feeling this more? / Oh, I'm not at the party and I'm not in my body…All this guilt is getting harder to deal with when I sober up.’
The EP ends with ‘Alice’, a heartbreaking song that explores an inseparable friendship that slowly becomes toxic as you realise you mirror each others worst habits and the friendship is actually bad for both sides. ‘You show me all I hate in my own image…I don't want you back / And we can't be friends, but I wish you the best.’
LeCount is only 23 but she already shows a creative maturity beyond her years. Her lyrics are deep, containing insightful stories of relationships and the human psyche that are rarely discussed in pop music, with the accompanying music having the same emotional weight that pulls you in entirely. If LeCount is this good at 23, she can only become a more powerful artist with each subsequent release. We met with LeCount on her recent visit to Australia to chat more about her music and career to date.
Hi Erin! You're here in Australia for the first time promoting your new EP PAREIDOLIA. I want to start with the title because I had to look up the word Pareidolia! What does it mean for those who don't know, and what does it mean specifically to you? How do you experience it?
There's a couple definitions of it, but the one that I've been referring to is the tendency to perceive meaningful connections between things that are not related. It's like an evolutionary thing where our brains try to recognise familiar patterns in things. So we look at clouds, and we try and assimilate faces or shapes of animals, or like a man in the moon. There was something really mystical about it that I loved, but there was also something psychological and scientific about it as well. For me, it was just the most beautiful way of saying there's a distorted lens of reality. There was this theme through the EP of self sabotage and going back to old familiar patterns of behaviour, even when it's self destructive, and I think this parallel of pattern recognising and familiarity and our brains seeking what feels safe and what we know was everything I was writing about. When I discovered the word pareidolia and that sensation, it just summed it up in this beautiful, imaginative, psychological one word.
Erin LeCount with Women In Pop’s Shalane Connors
Beautiful. It is your first time out here in Australia.. What have been the highlights of the tour? I saw that you went to see some koalas!
I did! I had the best day of my life meeting some animals, that was beautiful. It's made me convinced that aliens definitely exist because you have crazy animals here! Just looking at them, I was like, I can't believe these creatures are real. They're so gorgeous.
You sold out your tour as well
I did, which was surreal. The crowds were so gorgeous. They were so warm and welcoming, such high intense energy.
I was lucky enough to see you perform the other night and you gave a beautiful shout out to your fan girls. How important and how impactful is it for you to have those really dedicated fans?
I feel incredibly lucky and grateful to have accumulated the type of audience that I have because it's a lot of very creative, passionate people, particularly young women. There's plenty of non-women as well that come to these shows, but they're really ride or die. Whatever I give on stage, the audience gives me back tenfold. I feel incredibly lucky for that, and I definitely feed off it. It's so inspiring to see young passionate women in the front rows of those rooms. Their opinions and their perspectives on music and the industry are the ones that we should be valuing the most. They're so tapped into culture, and I just feel incredibly grateful. I feel inspired by it when I leave shows and in my personal life, I just admire people who love things that much and dedicate their lives to it, sort of how I dedicate my life to making music, they devote their lives to loving music and consuming music, and I just think what a beautiful life that is. It's inspiring.
You have quite an unusual setup for your shows. You're a one-woman show, and you build everything through drum pads and synths. Was that something you planned from the get go, or was that born out of necessity?
It was kind of born out of necessity and a sense of being a control freak, which I am by nature. I've been touring for a year, but I've been playing shows and playing live for a decade before this, which is crazy when I say that because I feel like I started really young. Getting into production and making the music on my own is how I really fell in love with music, and so to translate that on stage, it just felt like the most honest and intimate way to do that was to to be up there on my own. It gives me the same sensation of when I'm in the studio making a song and I'm bouncing from one thing to the next, dancing around the room. It's just this beautiful sort of flow state and my hands get to move on the synths and the machines and I'm running up and down the front of the stage and going back to them, and they feel like these grounding, anchoring points for me to connect back into myself, and then go to the audience and bounce between the two. It's like a giving and taking of energy kind of thing. I love doing these shows as a one girl band. It's so much fun.
Do you ever get lonely doing it yourself?
I've had really brief moments on stage where I've become hyper aware that I am the only person on stage. In the last year, especially when I’m touring back home, the stages have gotten significantly bigger. I played the Roundhouse in London, and I remember walking out onto that stage and feeling this sudden realisation that if this all goes to shit, I'm like the only person out here. It kind of felt like being in a spaceship and everyone felt so far away, and it felt so wide and grand. But then, instantly, as soon as the song started it just feels like you've got so much room to play and so much freedom. As much as it can be scary. I don't think it's ever been lonely, especially because the crowds are so loud. It's like having a literal choir in front of you. It's quite beautiful.
Have you ever had it all go to shit?
Yeah, these machines have lives and minds of their own, and we've had technical errors on this tour. The second show in Melbourne, songs were just completely freaking out. However, when you're doing a show like a girl and her machines, you kind of have to anticipate and respect that the machines are gonna have a mind of their own at some point. I just bring out my little stand up routine until we can figure out what's happening with them and they want to behave again. I just try to be as charming as possible!
Your latest single ‘In Cinema’ talks about the comparisons that artists inherently make to other artists, and and envy of there being films or songs that you wish you'd written and that strive for perfectionism that sometimes leads to paralysis. How has your journey been with that feeling?
I genuinely believe it's a cycle, and I'm in a season of the cycle where I feel really free and happy and flow state in making things right now. I definitely know that there's a period of time that I'm gonna be falling into comparison or overt self-criticism, probably in like a month or so. The thing I've learned to improve on is how I speak to myself during those times, and how I go about making things during those times. It's perfectly natural and human to feel jealousy or envy of things that people have created or other people's accomplishments. It's really hard to not absorb the pressure. However, I really have to train my brain to be inspired by that rather than blocked by it. The point of ‘In Cinema’ is there's hundreds of things I wish I was making, and I always feel like I could be making more art or better art, and actually, that's a really exciting concept. There's so much I haven't made yet, and that's such an open-ended beautiful room for possibility, rather than this like terrifying, daunting, ‘I'm never going to achieve this’ kind of thing. I think you can always learn something from what you're envying, so I just try and take that lesson, try to speak to myself nicely, try to make creating as playful as possible, and wait for it to pass.
What is the song you wish you'd written, and what is the film you wish you'd made?
Honestly, the song that I was thinking of when I wrote that is ‘Call Me Maybe’ by Carly Rae Jepsen. The line ‘before you came into my life / I missed you so bad’ is one of the greatest pop lyrics ever, and I love that song so much. I was really young when it came out, but I listen to it now, and I'm just always in awe of the simplicity. When I listen to pop, I really love this simplicity which I tend to overthink. Really great pop songs don't have anything to prove to you, and they're not trying to be too clever, and they're quite unashamed in their simplicity. That’s why that song is sort of maddening. It's so catchy, it's so genius, but in this incredibly unembarrassed way.
The film that I wish I'd made is d a film that inspired a lot of PAREIDOLIA is the Czech 1988 version of Alice in Wonderland called Alice. It's just beautiful, it's just stunning, and I watch it, and I'm like, ‘How was this made, like 25 years before I was born?’ It's everything I love, and it's just so magical and beautiful. I wish I'd made that.
What's coming up next for you?
A brief hibernation into really, really writing and being on my own for a bit, which I really need as just a person. I always need time alone as a person, I lean more introverted, and making music is kind of my downtime in a weird way. So I need a season of that, and then I'll be ready to go hard. I'm really excited about next year, and it feels like a really big, exciting year up ahead, so my hibernation is with the intent of being so ready for that.
PAREIDOLIA is out now via Warner Music. You can buy and stream here.
Follow Erin LeCount on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube.
