Aside from when the 19-year-old production student shreds riffs in ‘Pet Library’, Tim Andersson quietly works away at 8-bit-esque pop tunes for his debut EP ‘Superking’.
Influenced by the likes of Alex G, Teen Suicide, Elvis Depressedly, Molly and Florist, ‘Superking’ topics range from issues around mental health, personal experiences with friends, and an observational song about gentrificationĀ and homelessness in London.
“I started glance armstrong quite a while ago actually, about November 2016. It was a bit different, had a full live band and I had written eight tracks for an album but then scrapped them all because they just sounded like Alex G covers. The samples on the EP are mainly recorded just on my phone when I’m walking around. The one at the beginning of ‘buddy’ was in Ealing Broadway, and one was in Baker Street tube station. The idea of putting the samples in there was so that whilst listening to the EP, the listener would get the feeling they were in some sort of environment (i.e. a shopping mall, to coincide with the EP’s artwork) as if the music was being played live in said environment. I did this to try and make the EP as immersive as possible.”
“I stopped writing for a while,” Andersson continues, “then one day I came across a chiptune/8 bit cover of āHelenaā by My Chemical Romance and after listening to it I thought to myself ābit crusher is tightā and I started to write glance armstrong tunes again and infuse some 8-bit sounds and instrumentation in there. I typically mess around on Logic whilst I write, so my writing process and recording process are kinda the same thing. A lot of artists tend to write and then record, but for me I think I find it easier for it to be the same process so I can play about with and change virtual instruments, time signatures and song structure at will; it really helps me piece a track together to hear it back as Iām writing it. I also thought the term ābit popā sounded jokey so I wanted to refer to myself as that. So basically, glance armstrong, as it is, has been a thing since like May time.”
‘Superking’ will be out via Bandcamp and Spotify on September 16. You can listen to the first single off of the EP, ‘buddy’, below.