The official music video for “ALICE” opens on a hypnotic black and white spiral playing on an old television set.
It ends with Erin LeCount crossing the room, switching it off, and walking away.
Everything that happens between those two moments, the institutional waiting room chairs, LeCount and her fellow performer moving as mirror and shadow, the intimacy that keeps tipping into struggle, is the song made physical.
“ALICE” is a self-written and self-produced alt-pop track by London-based Erin LeCount about codependency and addiction, specifically the third thing that forms between two people when they share the same destructive patterns, the entity that binds them together as much as it pulls them under.
LeCount has described that third thing precisely in her own words: not the person, not herself, but the bond itself.
That clarity of thought is what separates “ALICE” from more conventional diary-form songwriting. She isn’t apportioning blame.
She’s mapping a structure, tracing how mutual struggle becomes mutual intoxication, how leaning on each other’s shoulders becomes the act of dragging each other down.
The production is sparse by design. Where “DON’T YOU SEE ME TRYING?” ran on nervous tension and escalating momentum, “ALICE” moves slowly, almost reluctantly, building only in the final chorus before pulling back.
The arrangement gives the lyrics room to breathe and room to sting, and LeCount uses that space without wasting a word.
“Hunger was all I was ever any good at” is one of the more deceptively loaded lines in LeCount’s catalogue, sitting inside a song that also contains “you got thinner than me and I hate you for that” and the verse where Alice calls her for dinner.
The word “hunger” is doing heavy, layered work: desire, addiction, competitive suffering, the specific language of bodies that don’t eat enough. The line doesn’t announce its meaning. It lets you find it.
“You pull me in with a drink / And you know damn well that I cannot resist” is where the competing forces collapse into each other.
The closeness and the danger occupy the same sentence. “Kissing my neck with your dagger in back” isn’t metaphor for betrayal so much as a description of how those two things can happen simultaneously, with full awareness on both sides.
The EP title PAREIDOLIA (the psychological phenomenon of seeing recognisable patterns in random images, faces in clouds) offers a frame for understanding what Alice actually is.
She is Erin’s pareidolia: a mirror in which she sees her own worst tendencies, her own hunger, her own reflection dressed in someone else’s face.
“Alice, I think sometimes you’re my mirror / You show me all I hate in my own image.” The love is real. So is the damage done by loving someone you’ve partially invented.
The bridge repeats “Love is not enough to save you now” eight times in succession, and the repetition is not a stylistic choice so much as a behavioural one.
That’s what it sounds like to keep telling yourself something you’re not yet sure you believe.
LeCount has described “ALICE” as the most sobering song to sing onstage, and the most promising sign that there is life on the other side. Those two things coexist without resolving each other.
In the video, LeCount and her counterpart move between closeness and fracture throughout, blonde and dark, light and shadow, neither quite able to let go.
In the final seconds, the spiral on the screen goes dark. LeCount walks toward a door. The other figure remains.
The spell breaks. The grief doesn’t.
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