ANDY’s debut EP, &e, is out today (October 23), giving listeners who discovered him through “Can’t Wait” the rest of the story.
The nine-track release follows last month’s video, which brought Ian Roberts and former West Coast Eagles player Mitch Brown into a queer footy fantasy. Brown played ANDY’s love interest in the clip, directed by Harry Welsh and produced by DIVISION.
The idea came from ANDY’s memories of growing up gay around rugby. As he told Rolling Stone AU/NZ: “What if it was safe? What if being gay or queer was just fucking normal?”
That film has since won silver in New Talent in Music Videos at the CICLOPE awards and earned a Best Low Budget Video or Visualiser nomination at the UK Music Video Awards.
For &e, ANDY describes a wider set of “uniforms”: the expectations attached to masculinity at school, at work and in religion. The EP is organised into three chapters, Liberation, Combustion and Acceptance, moving through sex and falling in love, the pressure to succeed, and finding room to be himself.
He describes the record as starting in shiny pop, then shifting abruptly between chapters until “the wheels come off”.
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The music began with home demos during his recovery from double spinal surgery. ANDY taught himself Ableton as he made them, through a period in which he says he had to learn to speak, sing and move his body again.
“You literally are listening to me find my voice again,” he says in the release notes.
Producer Jackson Barclay helped develop the demos into the finished EP. The pair built songs using recordings from ANDY’s life: “Can’t Wait” features intimate sounds, while “Lady” incorporates reassuring messages from loved ones.
“It was love at first song,” ANDY says of working with Barclay.
The EP closes with “Her Living Room”, a tribute to the grandmother who gave him the freedom to discover himself.
“She knew who I was before I had discovered it, but let me have the choice and autonomy to find it,” he says.
ANDY’s &e is out now. Check out the full tracklist below.
&e Tracklist
- “Can’t Wait”
- “Regret It”
- “LYBM”
- “Lettuce”
- “AAAH!”
- “Move”
- “Lady”
- “Beautiful Boy”
- “Her Living Room”
