Andrew Papas debuts his new single, Burn It Down. Photo / Supplied
Andrew Papas has broken away from his boy-band image and has jumped on the solo artist band wagon.
During his time in Titanium he was a double-platinum selling artist, toured internationally and even opened massive sell-out shows for Mariah Carey and Jason Derulo.
However, Papas decided he wanted to do it all by himself and called it quits from the band in December 2015.
Almost a year on, he's excited to be able to share his first debut single, Burn It Down.
"It feels really good. It's quite a big deal for me. As a creative person I had 10 months of not really doing much while I was transitioning. It was really frustrating for me. I needed to get out of the house and needed to do something creative. I was just losing my mind. It's really nice to be able to have a song out and to be doing something with it creatively."
The single is doing well on the New Zealand music charts and, surprisingly, also on the Australian charts, says Andrew. "It's doing really well there which is really weird because I hadn't done anything there. It reached number 18 on the Top 50 Australian Viral Chart on Spotify and I was like what the hell, that's random."
Papas worked on Burn It Down with friend and music producer Vince Harder ('Everything', 2008 - which was number 1 on the NZ charts at the time).
"It's always really awesome working with Vince Harder. I have a crazy amount of respect for him. I had a very specific idea about what I wanted for the song."
"We spent about seven hours in the studio and he had flown over from Sydney to work on the song and I had already written the lyrics - then I explained to him the message I wanted to convey, and he just brought that to life, it was crazy."
"We had worked with him before (with Titanium) so I knew what kind of guy he was. You know, a lot of producers can be stuck-up or people in the industry in general are not very approachable, but he's always been such a nice dude and still so successful."
Papas describes his first single as a song that gives him a fresh start musically and creatively.
"The story behind Burn It Down is pretty much just about when I was in the band (Titanium). We got a lot of knocks. We had a lot of people who were interested in us and they say they have your best interests at heart and they want do all these wonderful things for you. And then when you turn around, they are just screwing you, pretty much."
"My song relates to any situation as well, not just the music industry. There are people out there everywhere who say they have your back but really they don't, and it can really screw with you sometimes.
"The song is about putting that past behind me and just deciding 'you know what, I'm going to release my own single and going to start doing my own thing, making my own decisions, and I'm going to do this the way I want to do it'.
"It's about making the right decisions and putting those people behind me and just doing things right, you know, on my terms."
Papas is engaged to ZM host Megan Sellers and says he would love to sing to her on their wedding day.
"I would definitely love to sing something for Megan. I wouldn't like do a gig or anything at my own wedding, but yeah I would definitely want to sing something for Megan."
Burn It Down's music video is coming out on the 17 November.
Papas says "it's just going to be pretty straightforward and simple. I wanted it to be really stripped-back and again to really just introduce myself as who I really am. I didn't want too many theatrics and stuff like that. It's a bit more simple."
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