The official music video for “ALICE” opens on a hypnotic black and white spiral enjoying on an previous tv set.
It ends with Erin LeCount crossing the room, switching it off, and strolling away.
Every little thing that occurs between these two moments, the institutional ready room chairs, LeCount and her fellow performer transferring as mirror and shadow, the intimacy that retains tipping into wrestle, is the tune made bodily.
“ALICE” is a self-written and self-produced alt-pop monitor by London-based Erin LeCount about codependency and habit, particularly the third factor that kinds between two individuals once they share the identical damaging patterns, the entity that binds them collectively as a lot because it pulls them below.
LeCount has described that third factor exactly in her personal phrases: not the particular person, not herself, however the bond itself.
That readability of thought is what separates “ALICE” from extra typical diary-form songwriting. She isn’t apportioning blame.
She’s mapping a construction, tracing how mutual wrestle turns into mutual intoxication, how leaning on one another’s shoulders turns into the act of dragging one another down.
The manufacturing is sparse by design. The place “DON’T YOU SEE ME TRYING?” ran on nervous rigidity and escalating momentum, “ALICE” strikes slowly, virtually reluctantly, constructing solely within the ultimate refrain earlier than pulling again.
The association provides the lyrics room to breathe and room to sting, and LeCount makes use of that area with out losing a phrase.
“Starvation was all I used to be ever any good at” is without doubt one of the extra deceptively loaded traces in LeCount’s catalogue, sitting inside a tune that additionally comprises “you bought thinner than me and I hate you for that” and the verse the place Alice calls her for dinner.
The phrase “starvation” is doing heavy, layered work: need, habit, aggressive struggling, the precise language of our bodies that don’t eat sufficient. The road doesn’t announce its which means. It enables you to discover it.
“You pull me in with a drink / And you recognize rattling effectively that I can’t resist” is the place the competing forces collapse into one another.
The closeness and the hazard occupy the identical sentence. “Kissing my neck together with your dagger in again” isn’t metaphor for betrayal a lot as an outline of how these two issues can occur concurrently, with full consciousness on each side.
The EP title PAREIDOLIA (the psychological phenomenon of seeing recognisable patterns in random photos, faces in clouds) gives a body for understanding what Alice truly is.
She is Erin’s pareidolia: a mirror wherein she sees her personal worst tendencies, her personal starvation, her personal reflection wearing another person’s face.
“Alice, I feel typically you’re my mirror / You present me all I hate in my very own picture.” The love is actual. So is the injury achieved by loving somebody you’ve partially invented.
The bridge repeats “Love will not be sufficient to avoid wasting you now” eight instances in succession, and the repetition will not be a stylistic alternative a lot as a behavioural one.
That’s what it sounds prefer to hold telling your self one thing you’re not but certain you imagine.
LeCount has described “ALICE” as essentially the most sobering tune to sing onstage, and essentially the most promising signal that there’s life on the opposite aspect. These two issues coexist with out resolving one another.
Within the video, LeCount and her counterpart transfer between closeness and fracture all through, blonde and darkish, gentle and shadow, neither fairly capable of let go.
Within the ultimate seconds, the spiral on the display goes darkish. LeCount walks towards a door. The opposite determine stays.
The spell breaks. The grief doesn’t.
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