ANDY has chosen football chants, intimate recordings from his own life, and a music video starring Ian Roberts and former AFL player Mitch Brown to introduce “Can’t Wait”.
It leaves very little on the bench.
But the artist behind its sweaty sporting fantasy has been working towards this moment for years, and his musical background reaches well beyond pop.
ANDY traces his roots to jazz and soul. He describes Living Colour’s Time’s Up as an early awakening, while Janelle Monáe, Prince, and Vulfpeck were among the artists in heavy rotation when he began writing “Can’t Wait” around five years ago.
The song sounded different then. ANDY says the section that now plays out at the end was originally its drop; the current drop came later in the process.
By the time he reached the studio, his listening habits had shifted. Pop had taken over.
ANDY points to Sabrina Carpenter, Doechii, Troye Sivan, and particularly Chappell Roan as artists who expanded his sense of what contemporary pop could do, sonically and lyrically. Roan’s ability to push her sound while keeping it accessible made a particular impression.
Love Music?
Get your daily dose of metal, rock, indie, pop, and everything else in between.
“I loved how much she pushed sound and managed to make something huge feel palatable,” he says.
“I wanted the whole landscape sonically to feel like edging,” ANDY says, describing the track as a “constant push and pull” that keeps building until it finally explodes.
Combining football chants with intimate recordings from his own life put sexuality and Australian sporting culture into the song’s raw materials. As ANDY puts it, the idea was to merge “yeah the boys” with “kiss the boys” — a phrase he says became a reference point throughout the process of building the song with producer Jackson Barclay.
From Piano Demos to Something Much Bigger
Barclay’s relationship with ANDY did not begin with “Can’t Wait”.
When the pair first connected, ANDY was sending him more restrained material: ambient, piano-driven singer-songwriter demos built around chords and stacks of vocals. The harmonies, registers, and tones could start to feel like one large instrument, Barclay says.
“I loved ANDY’s voice and songs from the first time I heard them,” Barclay says.
“I was instantly excited to get him into the studio and see how much feeling and emotion we could draw out of those songs using interesting sounds and textures around his voice,” he says.
Once the pair had developed that working relationship, ANDY began sending over the poppier songs. Those tracks often arrived with one or two unusual sounds or samples inside a simple demo, something ANDY had made, discovered, or chopped up himself in Ableton.
They would take those ideas into the studio and see how far they could push them. Even as the arrangements grew, the sounds that first prompted the songs tended to survive.
“I’d say 99% of the time, that first weird or inspiring sample that sparked the demo is still somewhere in the finished record,” Barclay says.
‘Yeah the Boys’ Meets ‘Kiss the Boys’
On “Can’t Wait”, Barclay cut sharp bursts of sound from the football chants into the beat and used delays to make them bounce with the drums. The samples moved in and out of time, becoming part of the percussion.
ANDY’s more intimate recordings were treated in much the same way. The sounds were chopped and manipulated until they began functioning almost like risers, impacts, and crash cymbals. By the end, Barclay says, they had become a huge part of the production and drum programming.
The sporting world and the sexual world are embedded in the rhythm. That approach follows ANDY’s instinct to build songs around a narrative, something he connects to his acting background.
“Can’t Wait” is built around what he describes as a juvenile, difficult-to-control sexual urge, so the production had to feel equally restless. He wanted something primal underneath the playful vocal, a pulse that would keep pushing upwards.
The fantasy in the video has its own emotional destination. Directed by Harry Welsh and produced by DIVISION, it features Roberts and Brown, with Brown appearing as ANDY’s romantic interest. The sporting aggression gives way to tenderness, taking the song’s desire out onto the field.
The First Uniform Comes Off
“Can’t Wait” is also the opening move in a larger project.
ANDY’s debut body of work, &e, was written during what he describes as a “burn period” involving upheaval across love, grief, career, and health, including spinal surgery. Initially conceived as an EP, he says the project grew into something with a deeper conceptual shape — what he also describes as a “collection of feelings”.
Each song looks at a different uniform: an identity or expectation placed onto a person, the rules that come with it, and what happens when it stops fitting.
For ANDY, Australian sport made sense as the starting point. It is familiar and culturally recognisable, and it comes with an unusually literal uniform. Across the project, he says, those uniforms come off as he moves through different versions of himself, particularly as a queer person.
The music is designed to follow that process. ANDY uses pop as a starting point, then begins pushing at its edges, making abrupt changes that reflect the upheaval in his life.
He describes how “the wheels come off the shiny pop genre” as the project progresses. But the destination is quieter: after the disruption, he wants the music to arrive somewhere familiar and stripped back.
“What you listen to is me burning … and coming back to self,” he says.
“Can’t Wait” introduces the uniform. &e is about what happens when he starts taking it off.
Watch: ANDY – Can’t Wait (Directed by Harry Welsh)
