Erin LeCount on How Kate Bush's 'Cloudbusting' Inspired Her “Pareidolia” EP and Finding a Fan in Imogen Heap (Exclusive)
Erin LeCount on How Kate Bush's 'Cloudbusting' Inspired Her “Pareidolia” EP and Finding a Fan in Imogen Heap (Exclusive)
Ilana KaplanWed, February 25, 2026 at 4:00 PM UTC
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Erin LeCountCredit: Furmaan Ahmed -
Erin LeCount opens up to PEOPLE about how Kate Bush influenced her latest project
"Sometimes I think it would benefit my personal life if I didn't share as much, but I don't really know how to not take it there, if that makes sense," says the rising pop star
LeCount's PAREIDOLIA EP is out Friday, Feb. 23
Erin LeCount was listening to her favorite song of all time — Kate Bush's “Cloudbusting” — when she discovered the name of her latest project.
"I was thinking about [the song] and when you see shapes and clouds, and I was like, ‘There's got to be a name for that,’” the 23-year-old singer and producer recalls, brushing her platinum-blonde hair over her shoulder while sipping an Earl Grey tea at a Manhattan cafe. Amid a quick Google search while getting lost in the track, LeCount found the word “pareidolia,” which she immediately jotted down.
“[I] went sort of down a rabbit hole with it,” she explains. “It was so appropriate to everything that I was writing about in the sense of feeling like you see the world through a warped lens.”
Soon, PAREIDOLIA, which refers to the tendency to find a specific image in a visual pattern, became an obvious choice for the title of her latest project.
The EP, which is due Friday, Feb. 27, sees LeCount revisiting old habits, patterns and behaviors through a distorted reality. Like LeCount’s previous work, the EP is a bewitching self-exorcism that evokes Florence Welch’s baroque pop and Lorde’s soul-baring lyricism.
"I really struggle to filter what I'm saying," LeCount admits. "It's my equivalent of journaling. It's a lot of how I process things and understand what's happening in my life or in my head."
Erin LeCountCredit: Furmaan Ahmed
Before LeCount wanted to be a musician, she had other aspirations growing up in Essex.
“When I was younger, I wanted to be an author,” LeCount recalls. But as much as writing books seemed tempting, she couldn’t ignore her penchant for theatricality. She admittedly found herself “a little bit away with the fairies” and needed to put that innate energy for dancing, singing and storytelling somewhere. That’s when the dream changed — LeCount couldn’t ignore the allure of music.
Despite having no formal training as a musician, it was LeCount’s parents who shaped her tastes — her dad’s love of Daft Punk and Stevie Wonder and her mom’s love of ‘80s pop like Kate Bush and Tears for Fears. “So much of musical DNA comes from our parents, but I maybe didn't appreciate as much at the time,” she wonders.
At 8, she wrote her first song, "Strife." "It was very dramatic, she recalls. The following year, she found herself fascinated by a teacher who visited weekly and owned a local music venue. "I just had so many questions for him,” she recalls. Soon, he invited her to the music venue and for the next few years, LeCount found herself frequenting it every weekend.
"I would invite friends down, and we would all sort of play instruments, and mess about musically through the day before bands came and played shows in the evening,” she recalls Of course, that led to her sneaking into band nights and gigs herself. "Once I saw that, and the energy of a room, and the fact that that was possible, I just couldn't go back," she says.
Along the way, LeCount continued to develop her craft as a songwriter. "I wrote about saving the world a lot and world peace,” she recalls. But it wasn’t until she was roughly 16 or 17 that she was willing to share her songs.
Admittedly, LeCount says labels had been courting her since she was 18. However, she “was quite blind to it.” Instead, she focused on her craft. It wasn’t until late 2024 that she signed to Atlantic Records. Luckily, she had been building a relationship with them when her haunting single about privilege, love and shame, “Silver Spoon," ended up going viral thanks to TikTok. "I wouldn't have been able to facilitate that on my own,” she says.
Fans have since made videos compilations featuring the dynamics between Normal People’s Marianne and Connell, Heated Rivalry’s Shane and Ilya, Arcane's Jinx and Powder, Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy and more.
LeCount was humbled by the online reaction. "How I grew up finding music in my teens was Tumblr, and fan edits, and fandoms, and the music that it was edited to, that was my playlist,” she recalls. “So it just felt really full-circle.”
Nearly a year since she released her I Am Digital, I Am Divine EP, LeCount has garnered a cult fandom for her confessional songwriting, which tackles trauma, self-sabotage, technology, destructive cycles and hope. For the rising pop star, she doesn’t know how to be anything but honest. “I really struggle to filter to what I'm saying,” explains LeCount. “It's my equivalent of journaling it out. It's a lot of how I process things and understand what's happening in my life or in my head.”
Still, she’s aware of how “heavy” and “uncomfortable” some of the topics in her music can make people feel when they initially hear her songs. “Sometimes I think it would benefit my personal life if I didn't share as much, but I don't really know how to not take it there, if that makes sense,” says LeCount.
Her latest project, the six-track EP PAREIDOLIA, which examines “old habits, old patterns, old behaviors, and not being able to see things for what they were,” digs even deeper.
LeCount, who enlisted longtime collaborator Sam Taylor-Edwards for the album's visuals, found herself inspired by Kenneth Anger’s French short film La Lune Des Lapins. “It's beautiful,” she remarks. “It's very similar color palette to the cover art that I've used, so it's blues and blacks, and cool tones, and it's about a clown that's trying to reach for the moon, and then it all gets a bit surreal.”
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In particular, LeCount latched onto the rabbits featured in the film. “All the different iterations of Alice in Wonderland came into [the] writing and themes of the EP,” she explains.
Erin LeCountCredit: Furmaan Ahmed
On the existential art-pop song “I BELIEVE,” LeCount details her complicated relationship with religion, which is ironic considering she didn’t grow up devout at all. However, she “really struggled with quite obsessive compulsive thoughts about from when I was young about religion, being watched and being punished for being bad.”
“That became this vague, omnipresent representation of God to me. My relationship to that got fractured as I went into my teens, and I felt a lot of shame about that, who I loved and what path I wanted in my life,” she recalls.
Alternatively, LeCount, a self-described Aquarius Sun, Virgo Moon and Cancer Rising, has found solace in astrology, something she notes in the track. “Astrology, for me, was a way of feeling connected to something bigger than me, and connected to divination and a higher power without that heaviness of religion that I have associated with it,” she explains. “People can trivialize it, but it's been around for a hell of a long time.”
She recalls a sentiment that surfaced in “Silver Spoon” once again in “AMERICAN DREAM,” as she contemplates a life without kids. “I've written multiple times about not wanting kids or not feeling able to have kids,” she says. “I grew up with a lot of health issues, and the idea of having kids is something I'm not sure if I can do, and not sure if I want to."
For LeCount, who often writes about guilt and shame, finds another way to examine it on the dizzying “AMERICAN DREAM." “I feel very young, and I feel like there could be many things that I'm wrong about,” she says of her feelings on kids.
The devastating cut "ALICE" shares a common thread with her past number “Marble Arch,” where she laments her body image and the deterioration of a romance (“Hunger was all I was ever any good at,” she sings with a wistful lilt).
For LeCount, body image is something she only feels comfortable bringing up in songs. “I'm like every other teen, 20-year-old, 30-year-old woman onwards where it's built into us to be so full of shame, and I think the way I gather control over that is by writing about it," says LeCount.
Ultimately she wants listeners to give themselves grace. “It's not our guilt and shame about our bodies to carry,” she explains. “[Bodies] are just vessels."
Taking cues from her I Am Digital, I Am Devine EP, which was heavily inspired by her relationship with technology, LeCount compares the dissociation she experiences in her body to a machine on the arresting “MACHINE GHOST.”
Truthfully, she has “mixed feelings” about the rise of tech, as someone who self-produces, which explains why it’s become so prevalent in her music.
“I'm at the computer every day making these songs, and I couldn't do it without my laptop. That's my main instrument, but…there's a lot of doom and gloom around it,” she explains, noting that she has “a brain that works very much like a computer.”
“I process things in a certain way, and it can be quite cold and logical, and it can sometimes feel like sort of an error code in my brain when emotions come into that.”
Erin LeCountCredit: Furmaan Ahmed
As LeCount’s career has grown, her talent hasn’t gone unnoticed, especially by artists she admires. She’s since found a surprise fan in Imogen Heap, whom she’s had several calls with (“I cried on a train because I love her very much”) and landed some sage advice from Noah Kahan during a recent Grammys party.
“He made a point of coming to me, and telling me that he'd been listening for a long time, a few years and just gave some really beautiful advice,” she recalls. “He said, ‘The people who love what you're doing really intensely love it, and that's all you can focus on.’ I would've never had any idea that he is a listener ever.”
It’s something she’ll keep close to her as she works on what she hopes will become her debut album.
“I'm not too sure how long it will take, because, to me an album is like a marriage,” she declares. “But I'm never not making things."
PAREIDOLIA is out Feb. 27.
on People
Source: “AOL Entertainment”
