Tommy Lee doesn’t really sit still. Physically or conceptually. “I’ve got, like, ten things going on right now,” he says early on, then proceeds to list seventeen. One of those was Andro, his 2020 solo album that somehow managed to be half glam club burner, half brooding glitchcore experiment, and fully…not what you’d expect from the drummer of Mötley Crüe.
“Everyone’s like, ‘What the hell is this record?’” he laughs. “But dude — that’s the point.”
If the title sounds like a gender-fluid collection from a fashion label’s marketing team, that’s not an accident. Andro is short for androgyny, and the structure of the album reflects that: one side is all male-fronted songs, the other female-fronted. Not a concept album, exactly. More like a sonic split screen.
“I thought, let’s give equal space — a yin and yang,” Lee says. “There’s so much music out there that’s just dudes screaming. I wanted to make something that felt like it had both energies. That tension.”
The album was built like a producer compilation — think Timbaland or Mark Ronson with a houseful of Red Bull and no genre allegiance. Lukas Rossi shows up. So does Killvein. So does Push Push, a South African rapper with a sneer like Peaches on four hours of sleep.
“I love finding these underground people no one knows yet,” Lee says. “Push Push — I found her on SoundCloud or YouTube or something, I forget — and I’m like, yo, this girl is nasty! She’s gonna scare some people. Let’s go.”
There’s also a Mickey Avalon appearance. And a cover of Prince’s “When You Were Mine.” Wait, what?
“I’ve always loved that song,” Lee says. “And Prince, man — the guy was a god. He didn’t care about rules, or what people thought. He just did whatever the fuck he wanted and made it sexy.”
That idea — making whatever the fuck he wants — runs all through Andro. The tracks slide from trap to industrial to pop to rap-rock and back again, with the casual chaos of a TikTok algorithm having a mood swing. Lee plays most of the instruments himself and doesn’t seem the least bit interested in purism.
“Genres are bullshit,” he shrugs. “It’s just a fancy box people want to put you in so they can sell you easier. I’ve never stayed in a box.”
Of course, when you’re the drummer from Mötley Crüe, people think they already know your deal. Party, girls, drum solos on roller coasters. “But people forget — I’ve been doing this shit my whole life,” he says. “I was programming beats and playing keys when people still thought Pro Tools was a toy. I love the big rock show stuff, obviously, but I’ve always been deep in the tech side, the production side. I’m a studio rat, bro.”
So Andro wasn’t just a side hustle — it was a “real” record, in the sense that it wasn’t chasing anything but instinct. “I wasn’t trying to chart,” he says. “I just had these ideas in my head and thought, ‘What if I made a record like a mixtape?’”
Still, the cultural detritus of Mötley Crüe follows him like a smoke machine. He’s been name-checked in Post Malone songs and seen the band become shorthand for debauchery in Netflix biopics and Halloween costumes. “That stuff’s funny, man,” he says. “It’s like watching a cartoon version of your life.”
What keeps him grounded now isn’t nostalgia. It’s curiosity. He name-drops Yungblud, hypes Billie Eilish’s production style, talks about the DMs he gets from 20-year-old musicians who “barely know the Crüe shit but think I’m a cool weirdo.” There’s pride in that — not just surviving, but evolving.
“I’ll always be that dude who played upside down,” he says, “but I also want to be the dude who’s producing your next favorite track and you don’t even know it.”
Watch the interview above and then check out the videos below.
