Digital & Divine: Erin LeCount’s first headline tour

Words and images by Tilda Butterworth.

2025 has been the year of Erin LeCount, an artist, singer-songwriter and producer from Essex. Over the past few months, at only 22 years old, she has composed for Suzie Miller’s play Inter Alia at the National Theatre, released her second EP I Am Digital, I Am Divine, and been on her first international headline tour, performing in Berlin, Amsterdam, Brussels and Paris. I’m here at Village Underground in East London to see the culmination of that tour — its final, sold-out night.

Rain is pouring down on the queue, drenching a multitude of white lace skirts. Inside, down the stairs, Village Underground feels like a warm embrace in contrast with London’s September storms. The high-ceilinged warehouse has the air of a subterranean cathedral, not only because of the cobwebs adorning the brick walls (I’d have believed you if you told me they were set dressing), but because of the reverent buzz in the air. The venue fills to capacity in minutes, young people who have been queuing in the street for hours crowding close to the barrier holding bejewelled scrapbooks and handmade signs.

As the lights go down the intro begins, a disembodied digital voice instructing us: “Breathe in for one, two, three, four… hold, two, three, four… out two, three, four.” After this moment of grounding there is a collective intake of breath, and then a cacophony of sobbing begins behind me as soon as Erin steps onto the stage. The moment the crowd has been awaiting all day — and for weeks before that — has arrived. As the intro transitions into ‘I Am Digital, I Am Divine’, the title song of the album and the tour, the shouting immediately begins. The crowd knows every single word, chanting them like a prayer over Erin’s soaring vocals. The refrain: “To ache is to be alive”.

As someone who grew up in a generation of One Direction and Justin Bieber fans, there is something beautiful and healing about seeing this level of admiration directed at a young female producer. As an adolescent I always found the male centrism of those fanbases alienating, so it’s deeply heartwarming to see so many queer and neurodivergent girls finding a safe space for themselves in this room. While Erin’s mostly very young fanbase may not have experienced the events the often devastating lyrics centre around, her music touches on themes which are omnipresent to varying degrees in the teenage experience: heartbreak, isolation, humiliation, violation, power imbalance, social injustice. The audience is able to project their own experiences; to feel seen and heard.

The song which follows, ‘Marble Arch’, is one of my personal favourites. Its chorus is an insecure, searching internal monologue, the incessant, frantic questioning reminiscent of a glitching machine: “Am I hard to love? / Am I cold to touch? / Am I? Am I? Am I? / Is there a fault in my core? / Did I do something wrong? / Did I? Did I? Did I?”

This kind of refrain is an intrinsic, recognisable feature of Erin’s work — the very human yet also somehow robotic repetition reflecting the dichotomy established in the album’s title. It is both affirmation and doubt; both in touch with emotion and profoundly disconnected. In this age where people (regardless of age) are losing themselves to technology but paradoxically also finding themselves through online communities, this rings true.

The sea of phones recording tonight is certainly more than I’ve seen at once at any concert I've been to, but it makes sense — I often see young people online saying that they black out due to excitement and adrenaline during concerts and don’t remember the experience at all afterwards unless they can watch the videos back. I empathise — Taylor Swift’s 1989 tour in Hyde Park is a literal black hole in my memory, try as fourteen-year-old me might have to capture it through the camera of my iPod Nano. A meaningful concert can rewire something in your brain on such a level as to cause temporary memory loss.

The way Erin addresses the crowd between songs is breathless, raw and honest, without a hint of pretence. Even when clearly overwhelmed by emotion, she seems entirely in control. She is able to ground the room and calm the chaos, rather than feed into it. Even without taking into account the enormous wings behind her, she has an angelic stage presence, both slight and intimidating. She carries herself between pieces of equipment delicately but with steadiness, her gestures and movements an extension of the music, a demonstration that she knows every single beat and layer backwards and inside out.

‘Killing Time’ begins and ends with a sample of the rhythmic beat of a windscreen wiper. All night the stage lights have been reminding me of passing headlights in the dark, and now this song places us concretely in that liminal space: a car journey, a night drive. ‘Mind The Gap’ also harks to the universal experience of being transported somewhere, the liminal space of the underground: “When you left this is how I adapted / So don’t tell me that I don’t know the difference / Between being fine and being distracted / Mind the gap on your exit”. ‘Machine Ghost’, an as-yet unreleased song about dissociation, is counterintuitively epic sonically. Erin’s voice soars into the rafters, the expanse of the brick room giving it space to breathe. ‘White Ferrari x I Know The End’ (a cover mixing songs by Frank Ocean and Phoebe Bridgers) is another favourite of mine, and how I discovered her music two years ago after TikToks of her playing it in an abandoned church or sitting on a mountain in Los Angeles went extremely viral.

For me, the most ecstatic moment of the evening comes when she plays her new song ‘808 HYMN’, which was released a few days ago while she was on tour in Brussels. It recounts the experience of walking home alone and feeling as though you’re being followed. “I've been praying to the constellations,” Erin sings, “Turns out they were all just satellite stations!” the crowd screams back.

As the song continues, all frantic drum beats and breathless gasps, I find myself tearing up for the first time tonight, not from joy but from anger. I have never heard a song which speaks so truthfully to my experience of inhabiting the world as a woman right now — those rampant, often paranoid but usually accurate fears — and it feels at once empowering and enraging.

“There’s humming in the air, the streetlights are dimming

It’s the dark before dawn when the birds start singing

It’s praying you can make it for just five more minutes

God, it’s quiet, and it’s violent, and it’s everywhere I go

It’s the sweat in my palms when I'm praying to the god

“I promise I'll believe, if you could just get me home””

Further back in the crowd, it is noticeable how this song in particular causes a stir, as Erin warns the audience to stay safe on their way home in light of the far-right protests taking place in London the next day. It would be doing the crowd a disservice not to acknowledge how diverse it is in every possible way. Sure, the first few rows are mostly teenage girls, but as you get further back the dynamic changes. An older gay couple know the words to all of the songs and hold on to each other and beam the whole way through. There are people in their 40s and 50s standing alone — perhaps parents accompanying children who have made it to the barrier, perhaps not. There are groups of friends hanging back near the fringes of the room so that they can have space to dance, arms linked, heads resting on each others’ shoulders. Erin often describes her music as containing ‘big feelings’, and it clearly appeals to those who feel things keenly and exteriorise their emotions, but a glance around the room shows that it profoundly affects those who internalise, too. Plenty of people are standing completely still, fixated on what is happening before them and quietly processing.

As the song ‘Heaven’ begins, a trans pride flag inscribed with lyrics and signatures is passed to Erin on stage by those at the barrier. I always feel overwhelmed by emotion when a trans flag appears on stage, and will forever remember the first time I saw this happen, at Ethel Cain’s London show two years ago. This one reads, “You salvaged what was left of me”, a lyric from the song. It seems hyperbolic, perhaps, at a first glance, but then I remember the torture and melodrama of being that young — the awkward first queer relationships, the agonising process of coming out, the hiding from friends and family — and realise that my distance from that has made me cynical. That really is what it feels like, and it’s incredible that these young people have the words to express that.

The final song of the show, ‘Silver Spoon’, tells of the experience of growing up in different circumstances from the person you’re in a relationship with. “Cause I've changed my accent / And I gave a false name / I hope I throw a party / In a house of my own someday,” Erin sings, flinging out her arms to gesture to the room at the final line. These songs of heartbreak and suffering that came into being years ago now find themselves in a very tangible reality, originating in the intimacy of the garden shed where she makes music and now being played to a communion of people. It is cathartic for all involved. And I would say that it’s an honour to be here for Erin LeCount’s rise to fame, but she’s been rising for a long time already.

As the lights come on I climb the stairs and leave the venue, full of big feelings and the sense that this next generation of music fans will be alright. They are growing into themselves, understanding (with the validation of musicians like Erin) that they are the backbone of the music industry. It’s very difficult to imagine what the atmosphere in the room would be without the barrier devotees.

I put my headphones in as I walk through Shoreditch in the dark to the bus stop, and press play on ‘808 HYMN’.

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