There are easier ways to introduce yourself as a new pop artist.
ANDY has chosen football chants, intimate recordings from his own life, a queer reimagining of Australian sport and a music video starring Ian Roberts and former AFL player Mitch Brown.
As an opening statement, ‘Can’t Wait’ leaves very little on the bench.
But underneath the provocative ingredients is an artist who has been working towards this moment for years — and whose musical background is considerably broader than the song’s sweaty sporting fantasy might initially suggest.
ANDY traces his musical 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 first began writing ‘Can’t Wait’ around five years ago.
By the time the song reached the studio, his listening habits had shifted.
Pop had taken over.
Love Music?
Get your daily dose of metal, rock, indie, pop, and everything else in between.
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, lyrically and in the scale of its ambition.
That changing musical diet helped turn ‘Can’t Wait’ into something bigger and stranger than its earliest form.
“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.
The raw materials were unusually personal.
ANDY combined football chants with intimate recordings from his own life, using the collision between those two worlds to mirror the subject of the song: sexuality inside the hyper-masculine environment of Australian sport.
Music producer Jackson Barclay had a succinct way of describing what they were chasing.
“Let’s merge ‘yeah the boys’ with ‘kiss the boys’,” Barclay says.
It became the pair’s studio motto.
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 considerably more restrained material: ambient, piano-driven singer-songwriter demos layered with harmonies, vocal registers and textures.
“I loved ANDY’s voice and songs from the first time I heard them,” Barclay says.
The early demos often centred on relatively simple chords surrounded by stacks of vocals, which Barclay says could begin to feel like one large instrument rather than a conventional lead vocal with backing parts.
That was what first interested him.
“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,” Barclay says.
Once the pair had developed that working relationship, ANDY began sending over the poppier songs.
Those tracks often arrived with one unusual sound or sample buried inside a relatively simple demo — something ANDY had made, discovered or chopped up himself.
Barclay says those strange initial ideas became an important part of the language they developed together.
“I’d say 99% of the time, that first weird or inspiring sample that sparked the demo is still somewhere in the finished record,” he says.
On ‘Can’t Wait’, those details became impossible to ignore.
‘Yeah the Boys’ Meets ‘Kiss the Boys’
The football chants weren’t simply laid over the finished track as a provocative flourish.
Barclay treated them as musical material.
He cut larger transients from the chants into the beat and used delays to make them bounce around the drums, allowing the samples to move in and out of time and become part of the percussion itself.
ANDY’s more intimate recordings were treated in much the same way.
The sounds were chopped, processed and manipulated until they began functioning like risers, impacts and crash cymbals.
By the end of the production process, Barclay says they had become part of the architecture of the track rather than something simply placed over it for shock value.
That distinction is important.
‘Can’t Wait’ might have an immediately clickable concept, but ANDY and Barclay were trying to make the concept audible.
The sporting world and the sexual world aren’t simply referenced in the lyrics or video — they are embedded into the rhythm and production.
For ANDY, that makes sense because he tends to approach songs through narrative.
Coming from an acting background, he says he naturally thinks about what a track is trying to do dramatically.
‘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.
The playful vocal sits over something more primal underneath.
WATCH: ANDY – ‘Can’t Wait’ | Visit the ‘Can’t Wait’ website
The First Uniform Comes Off
‘Can’t Wait’ is also part of a much larger project.
ANDY’s body of work, ‘&e’, was written during what he describes as a “burn period” involving upheaval across love, grief, career, health and spinal surgery.
The concept running through the project is the idea of uniforms.
Each song looks at a different identity or expectation that gets placed onto a person — the roles they are given, the rules that come with them and what happens when those roles stop fitting.
For ANDY, Australian sport made sense as the starting point.
It is familiar, polished and culturally recognisable.
It is also an unusually literal uniform.
“As we move through our eras, our varying states of self, these ‘uniforms’ we are expected to wear — especially as queer people — the uniforms come off,” he says.
The music is designed to follow that process.
ANDY says ‘&e’ begins inside relatively recognisable pop structures, then gradually pushes at their edges. The further the project moves, the less interested it becomes in staying neatly contained.
“The wheels come off the shiny pop genre,” he says, describing a body of work that increasingly blurs and disrupts the format it begins inside.
That makes ‘Can’t Wait’ an appropriate introduction.
The visual takes the same idea further. Directed by Harry Welsh and produced by DIVISION, the ‘Can’t Wait’ video turns the sporting world into a queer fantasy featuring Ian Roberts and former AFL player Mitch Brown, with Brown cast as ANDY’s romantic interest.
It is an audacious visual statement.
But the more interesting promise might be that ANDY does not intend to stay there.
‘Can’t Wait’ introduces the uniform.
‘&e’ is about what happens when he starts taking it off.
