It’s been a while since an artist has emerged with the rare ability to pull listeners into an intricate, transfixing world quite like self-taught artist and producer, Erin LeCount. The cherubic 21-year-old is a visionary sonic architect, the sole writer of her music; her luscious baroque-pop arrangements, paired with diaristic lyrics and synths offer an alluring interplay of vulnerability and power. Erin LeCount has arrived with a sumptuous, fully formed aesthetic. She finds stirring metaphors in the repurposing of religious imagery (a crown of blood, a single cross hung on a white wall behind her, stained glass above a sparse altar), and a certain morbid sensuality in images of half-eaten, discarded, moldy fruit lying sallow on the ground…. It all comes together in a way that shape-shifts for each and every listener.

At 17 (during 2020 lockdown), she locked herself in her bedroom, learning to produce on Logic, writing songs, and posting them online. She began writing with other artists but the experience reminded her of childhood pressures. Instead, Erin embraced total creative control, much like fellow singer-producers Grimes and Caroline Polachek. Erin’s music reflects both her raw, commanding energy and the influence of her mother’s ballet career. The beauty of Swan Lake, which played on repeat at home, has shaped her visuals and aesthetic sensibility.

The insular realities Erin LeCount evokes in her music sound and feel like delicate flowers forced to bloom in Winter. “Me and my voice do not do what a perfect pop singer is supposed to do,” she says. “My songs are questioning everything and I think my fans are too—I’m a perfectionist and I want to know every answer.” But it’s that attempt at transcendence through the cold that captures something of what it means to be divine in a digital age.