Four months ago, the British alt-pop artist Erin LeCount got an email. The team behind the stage play Prima Facie—a tightly wound, sell-out legal drama that earned Jodie Comer an Olivier and a Tony Award—had her in mind for something. Suzy Miller and Justin Martin, the play’s writer and director respectfully, had seen TikToks of her swirling around her room in her staple white dress uniform and heard her music, which has all the pain and breathless percussion of Florence + the Machine if she had the sonic inclinations of 2010-era Grimes. They were working on Prima Facie’s follow-up and needed someone to do the score. Would the 22-year-old be into it?
That project was Inter Alia, which opened at the National Theatre in London this month to glowing reviews. It stars Saltburn’s Rosamund Pike as a high-flying court judge facing a familial moral quandary. When LeCount read the script, she said, “my heart felt like it dropped into my stomach, and it was immediately clear after reading that I wanted to make music off the back of it.”
With one traditional track, and a series of looming instrumentals, LeCount was responding to the brief she’d been given by Martin: What does the patriarchy sound like? Inter Alia mostly deals with what it’s like to be a powerful woman in settings where men have traditionally set the status quo. It asks: Is it possible to be morally infallible when the people closest to you are, in societal terms, working against you?
For it, LeCount called upon past collaborator James Jacob to “share the workload,” she says. As well as producing for the likes of Little Simz and Nia Archives, Jacob composed the score for How to Have Sex and the BBC series What It Feels Like For a Girl. “This is the first time I’ve ever been named composer for anything,” she says. “I felt like James would have a balance and insight to it as well, something that I really value from him.”
Together, they sat with the sounds of Inter Alia from the rehearsal room through tech rehearsals and into previews. As a musician, she’s used to staring out into crowds; with Inter Alia, she’s in the back of the room, surveying how it sounds. “It’s more terrifying this way,” she says with a little laugh. “I sit in the audience every night, and I’m shitting myself and I feel physically sick!”
Even if she’s not acting today, the stage has been in LeCount’s life since she was young. “My mom was a ballet dancer, and the only thing that I wanted to watch when I was younger was Swan Lake,” she says. (Today, funnily enough, her signature stage accessory is a pair of white regal wings.) She wrote a lot as a child and had a stint on kids’ reality television before coming into her own as a teenager. She got into coding (“I was into Raspberry Pi. My biggest achievement was coding a calculator once”) and, through it, got a kick out of producing songs herself. “I’m a slight control freak, and [producing] combined everything that I loved.”
For the most part, even now, she writes and produces much of her music herself in her garden shed. Her songs creak and crack in a strange way, like a glitching GIF of a nature reserve. But her voice is big and bendy and confronting, carrying her sometimes morose messages. On “Marble Arch,” she sings: “I’m scared if I learn to be happy / I’ll forget how to write songs.” Her worldbuilding lifts from ghostly Tumblr images, like the video for “silver spoon (demo),” recorded on her Macbook in her bathtub, where she sings most of the time.
That aesthetic and sound? “It’s everything I love and feel connected to: questions about religion and spirituality, body and dance,” she says. For a long time, people told her she sounds like artists she didn’t listen to. She was scared of the pragmatism of “worldbuilding” as a phrase. “These days,it takes me back to writing the stories when I was younger. If you live in your own imagination, you can put that across to other people, and they find comfort in that as much as you do.”
Now that her work on Inter Alia has wrapped, it’s back to the shed to work on new music. When’s it coming? What does it sound like? She’s not quite ready to answer those questions. “I’ve written the things in my own work that I’m most proud of during this process,” she teases. “It feels like there’s something special happening.”
FURTHER QUESTIONS FOR ERIN LECOUNT
What’s your iPhone screen time this week?
7 hours and 23 minutes.
What mythical creature would you be?
A white centaur.
What smell reminds you of growing up?
Lavender. My nan would always have it.
Are you a fast or slow walker?
Fast, too fast. I can deduct 10 minutes from what it says on maps.
What did you want when you were younger that you have now and don’t think about so much?
Pretty clothes and blonde hair.
Inter Alia is running at London’s National Theatre until 13 September. It will play in cinemas via NT Live from 4 September.