ERIN LECOUNT // To Ache Is To Be Alive: Praying at the Altar of Spilled Milk, Holy Ghosts + Statues of Selfhood
Holy heartbreak, her sacrament of sound, and the cathedral of grief she sings into stone— Erin LeCount’s latest EP, I Am Digital, I Am Divine is equal parts exorcism and exploration.
Written by: Syn Devereaux
Photo via twntythree.com
I Am Digital, I Am Divine by Erin Lecount is nothing less than a profound thesis on love and grief. At only 22, this multi-faceted London artist and self-proclaimed “eternal work in progress” writes, produces, and sings with a raw, transcendent and holy power. Her latest five track EP feels like a gospel sermon delivered straight to the heavens– deeply personal, cathartic, and utterly, absolutely divine. I don’t go to church, and I am not religious but during this EP play, I am sat, facing forward in the pew, lyrics open wide like scripture and I am p r a y i n g.
The EP opens with the title track, I Am Digital, I Am Divine and phew. The harmonies opening alone is enough to send shivers down my spine and straight back up to God herself. “There's no use crying over spilt milk/ He doesn't understand why it's such a big deal to me/ And he never will again/ There's no use crying over spilt milk/ But I don't know how I'm supposed to feel/ I fear I never will” Umm, excuse me? What a fucking opener?
We all have that relationship that fell on deaf ears, blind eyes and a dead soul. Well, hopefully you never have at least and I’m here crying in my tall glass of milk (coffee). (Shh, I am one of the few who truly enjoys a cold glass of milk, ok!) I feel the compulsion to take what's left of it and spill it down the drain too. I’m a gal who loves a good metaphor and this? This… this is everything. Milk white in purity, down the drain, is it her innocence? Nourishment? Her love? The love of all loves? The relationship itself? Maybe (probably), all of the above.
That ache though? That’s real– and it’s fucking earned.
Lecount doesn’t stop there though– no, no. She keeps going. A musical exorcism bathed in holy water (milk) and tainted chastity. The chorus is the entire thesis on the song and album as a whole– “We stand there in the kitchen/ We both know that this is it, yeah/ The milk pours down the sink and/ I'm having big feelings/ Our love and milk expired/ And I'm too tired to fight it/ To ache is to be alive, to ache is to be alive/ To ache is to be alive, to ache is to be alive/ I am digital, I am divine/ To ache is to be alive” HOLY FUCK.
The refrain of, “To ache is to be alive” – that… THAT is the human experience in six words. “Our love and milk expired and I’m too tired to fight it” WOOF! Been there, felt that. Choking on the soured milk, drinking it down knowing it met its expiration– feeling the stomach ache of it after. Even after it’s left your body, it takes time to fully dissolve from your system. The exhaustion of fighting something you know isn’t working is a special kind of pain, but on the other side of that? Bravery. Surrender. Sovereignty. Ownership of your own narrative, finally.
Just yesterday, I was telling one of my best friends (and honestly, younger me too) that the pain of the ending of the relationship is so heavy because it mattered. That it’s okay that it did–that it mattered or ended– it’s okay that it hurts. To feel it? All in its entirety is a gift that not enough people allow themselves to feel. Erin manages this in fucking spades. Just because something ended or soured years ago, doesn’t mean that the bitterness of the taste doesn’t bubble up in your mouth, laying on your tongue from time to time– acting as a gentle (or bitter) reminder of the fire we walked through to get to where we are.
The song closes and goes right into track two, Marble Arch– so seamlessly you don’t even know what’s happening. Her harmonies ringing from ear to ear and scratchy guitars build something inside you only for the plucky harp to gently disarm you, knocking all the blocks you built down. The second verse reads as the back of a matchbook with “This body used to be my home now it's just an homage/ A souvenir I gave to everyone I love/ The walls of my heart look like museum corridors/ The love that I gave you was art in my form/ But I'm scared if I learn to be happy/ I'll forget how to write songs” just for the chorus to strike the sulfur, lighting you up with, “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?” I have full body chills. This hurts– and deep. Pressing on an ancient wound I was inherently born with.
Too many times have I spent my life asking these exact questions– am I actually hard to love? Is this why people leave? Even in a sea of people, is this why I’ve spent so much of my existence feeling so alone? Her harmonies joining the harp and the beat create something lived in, yet beatified. It’s a holy sacrament only few know the taste of. Its grace in melody and chords; softness and a bullet wound wrapped in sacred linen.
“I am breaking my back, bending to your heart/ My spine curves against your fingertips/ Like a marble arch/ I try to make the ache something beautiful to watch/ I'm a statue you can pray to/ You complain I'm cold to touch” As an eldest daughter– the prodigal daughter more like– the expectation to bend around others, breaking backs to please the people who sainted and martyred me– placing me on a pedestal I never asked to be on, only to fall like Lucifer himself and punished for it. It’s a double edged sword– being the statue people pray to, yet complain about. Lecount’s imagery with Marble Arch is a blessed testament to what it feels like to make yourself small to fit what others want while simultaneously dismantling it with a wrecking ball and watching the statue crumble.
The song ends with her broken whispers, scratchy vocals repeating “I don’t wanna be cold anymore” – the exhaustion bone and soul deep saying “I will not be your version of me anymore.”
With only two tracks deep, I Am Digital, I Am Divine is a reckoning with self and grief. Sweet Fruit doesn’t hold back with the emotional punches. “I'm a sweet fruit that's dying on the vine
Growing in a dark room, tryna find the light/ I can bend my body to your will/ You shine and I crawl to the windowsill/ Spring has arrived and there is no time left to kill/ Slept through December feeling sorry for myself/ The last time that you touched me was July and no one else/ Can light me up the same and so these days I wilt” I– I don’t even know where to begin here.
In February 2024, I wrote a poem called bruised. This song feels like a mirror to that moment that I was trying so hard to convey during a particularly dark time in my life. It’s tenderness in vulnerability isn’t to be undermined or underestimated– it’s a plea to be chosen, to be picked and not left on the vine to rot. But only to be met with disdain and disregard, yet still chasing their light and attempting to grow from it anyway. “I need a gardener, a doctor, a priest, or a lover
I need someone, I need someone/ I need a priest, a gardener, a doctor, a lover/ I need someone/ To look through and see me, to rip out the weeds/ Growing where my heart was” Fucking HELL. Asking anyone– even a gardener– to exorcise the pain? Take a spade or a rake, just make it go away? Bury me right there, please.
That begging and pleading with the universe is a pain I wouldn’t wish on anyone. It’s the very pain that has you in the earth, on your knees praying to something you may or may not believe in– dirt under your fingernails and bloodied palms, tear tracks down your cheeks, hair unkempt. “Please, please, please” with hands pressed together, looking up at the sky. “Something. Anything. Anyone– save me.” It’s as visceral and universal as a papercut, only to be a death of a thousand papercuts. There is saving in its brutality.
Godspeed, track four, brings us into a higher tempo– dancing on graves of loves lost and freshly buried. The exhumation over, the funeral procession long gone and flowers wilted and dead as the body six feet under. When I first heard this, I pictured myself dancing– sweaty and uninhibited to some club in the deep underground scene of London. Donned in my finest black dress, mascara caked under my eyes, a plastic cup of what-the-fuck-ever mystery alcoholic drink dripping in condensation in shaking my hands, like me and just letting go. Of it all– the pain. The memories. The resentment. It’s grief moving through the body in a way that is reverent and unapologetic– feral and alive, still begging for life– something most people don’t grant themselves the permission to feel.
Godspeed is punchy and sardonic, laced with that same sour smack we taste with I Am Digital, I Am Divine. Though now, Lecount is relishing in it and she’s not apologizing. “Godspeed to the girl after me/ She's young and she's sweet, I wanna tell her one thing/ ‘Abandon faith in everything you believe’/ The song that I sing will fall on deaf ears/ Getting under her skin till the day it is clear/ And we sing the same song about him” This is a warning and a curse and makes you feel the marrow in your own spine. He didn’t change with her, and he won’t change for the next or the next. That feeling of freedom of washing your hands finally of something or someone is so freeing and liberating, but there is duty and responsibility for the next girl saying, “Godspeed, sister. Proceed with caution.”
“My bones in your teeth/ My heart's kick drum typе beat/ God, I just wanted to dance/ But I havе two left feet/ And I don't wanna speak/ So I carry the grief, it repeats” And it does– repeat and act as an ear worm, getting your body moving through something you didn’t know you needed to release. It gives Fleetwood Mac’s Silver Springs– saying: “You will never get away from me or the love I gave. No matter who lays next to you. That is your curse, your cross to bear, not mine.” It’s equal parts incantation and cautionary tale wrapped in one and that’s it’s fucking magic.
We finish the EP with Silver Spoon– a viral track for Lecount on TikTok. In fact, it was actually how I discovered her– the snippet I heard stopped me dead in my tracks, buckling my knees and demanding me to look at something I’ve been too scared to give witness to.
The song is devastating. Plain and simple. If you’ve grown up with the feeling of knowing poverty lines and broken homes, you’ll really feel the devastation this song brings in its four minutes and fourteen seconds. Never one to really fit in, know romantic love or feel like I belong– this song was a comet and I was the entire pre-historic population. Silver Spoon acts as witness, a testimony to finding yourself in spaces you never lived in but should have. “I spilt the good wine, I panicked/ A disaster, a knee-jerk reaction/ Then everyone around us starts laughing/ Is that how it's meant to happen?/ Oh, your mother said I'm always welcome/ To visit, to take second helpings/ I said, ‘No, thanks’, I'm so full on resentment/ That I learned to fend for myself, but–”
Okay, look Erin– I just wanna talk.
No really though, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve run scenarios in my mind similar to this or found myself in similar situations with friends who had loving parents– a normal childhood, etc. The ache of wanting normalcy and understanding– un-fucking-conditional love– is so, so heavy in this song. “In another life, maybe I was you/ And I grew up into something good/ Somebody who could swallow love [Chorus] I bet you grew up eating at the table/ Fed love from silver spoons, reasons to be grateful/ You ask about kids, I don't know if I'm able/ I bet you grew up being asked how your day was/ I bet you grew up grazing your knees/ But the fall wasn't fatal like it was for me/ We're the product of love that we do not receive/ I'll corrupt every branch of this family tree” O U C H Y.
“I grew up into something good, somebody who could swallow love” this never absolutely eviscerates me. It loops back to Sweet Fruit and being stuck on the vine, waiting for love– to be picked, chosen, devoured senseless because then maybe, just maybe, it’d all be worth it. When the song was released, I couldn’t help but feel inspired writing cavities– feeling like my own generational trauma and class disparity was enough to rot someone to the core, and blueprint to reclaim the house of horrors I grew up in.
Despite the trauma, I still grew up into something good. “‘so what if i am soft?’ ‘there’s still so much of me that is good!’ ‘i am good, right?’” Silver Spoon is the ache and the balm, all into one. She does not ask for permission or forgiveness to exist, she just does.
If “It’s okay to be soft” is a whisper on bruised, I Am Digital, I Am Divine rings like a bell loud enough to hear from Pluto. This EP is a sacrament, a release, a love letter, an excavation and exploration of grief, love, heartache and everything in between. Silver Spoon pulled me into Erin’s world, and the EP has me as a forever fan. Her music isn’t just something you listen to, it’s something that commands you to feel.
Each song on I Am Digital, I Am Divine isn’t just tracks laid out in a garden shed– no. It’s someone’s heart and soul, bare, raw and wide open for consumption in the most delicate and reverent of ways. It is a hallowed sacrament and Erin is asking us to join her in communion, to drink from the venerated chalice not the body of Christ, but of our holy ghosts of breakups past. By the time the final track dissolves, I’m stripped bare, naked, and raw. I’ve knelt, ached, risen like Jesus himself. Erin Lecount didn’t just write an EP—she wrote scripture for the godless, balm for the broken, and a survival guide for your inner divinity.
There’s a fine line between drama and truth, between what is theatrical and gluttonous. Erin walks that tightrope with reverence, rage and so much grace– never once losing balance. She doesn’t ask for your attention– she demands for your surrender.
“To ache is to be alive.” If that’s the gospel she’s preaching, then baptize me in her sacred righteous water. I’ll be the one in the pew, eyes shut, fists clenched, tears falling– praising, weeping, screaming “YES” to the altar of heartbreak, and walking out reborn, renewed and revived.
Amen.
