Twin Atlantic
Frontman Sam McTrusty on Glasgow's "sarcasm and shite weather", and taking the power back…
The vocals still have that unmistakable Glaswegian twang – but on every other front, Twin Atlantic are a band transformed since we first met them on 2009’s alt.rock debut, Vivarium. Parting ways with their label, building a studio on home turf and embracing an electro-rock sound for fifth album POWER, frontman Sam McTrusty is defiant when it comes to the new era: “I don’t particularly care what people’s opinion is, because rock music takes no prisoners.”
You’ve said you had a “car crash moment” before this album… Yeah, we did. But it was only once we were three weeks beyond it that we were like, “Fucking hell, that was mental”. Nothing soured or anything, but our relationship with our label, we’d just reached the end. We went from having all these connections to being on our own and self-funded. You don’t realise how much something means to you until it’s teetering on the edge of a cliff.
What was your vision for this album? We wanted to reflect a part of our musical taste that we’d never known how to integrate. We started the band when we were eighteen, quickly got a deal, and were given all these big supports with American-influenced rock bands. We kinda stuck to our lane. But with POWER, it was like, “I want to make an album that gives me that weird, dark, euphoric feeling of a club night in Glasgow”.
Do darkness and euphoria sit together well? Yeah. Even when I started writing songs, I was trying to use the cinematic elements that Springsteen would bring into his songs, and fuse that with the darkest, angsty, fuzzy Kurt Cobain punk-rock.
I guess that’s why bands like Depeche Mode always resonated with me: they had fucking life-affirming choruses, but it’s sad subject matter. I don’t know if that’s because I’m from Glasgow and it’s a hardedged place. We’re world-famous for our sarcasm and shite weather, but also for our amazing parties and sense of humour.
What was the appeal of putting down roots in Glasgow? If you’re from Glasgow, you’re kinda injected with this insane loyalty, where you know that a lot of it is kind of a fucking shithole, but you grow to love it and nowhere else feels like home. But the main reason is, we’ve got creative freedom here. We don’t have someone looking over our shoulder, don’t have to schmooze with agents. Whenever it gets too businessy, we think the fun gets sucked out.
“Nowhere else feels like home… we've got creative freedom here.”
You sing in your native accent – why? I grew up right in the sweet-spot of Blink182, Green Day, Sum 41 – all these really Floridian or Californian pop-punk bands. So I’d sing in that accent. Then I watched a video back of myself, and I was like, “Who the fuck is that?” I was doing the proper Tom DeLonge thing. I was like, “Fuck that, man, I’m just gonna sing in my own voice ’cos that sounds really alien.”
Is the Glasgow kiss a myth – or does that actually happen? No, it does happen. There’s guys in this band that I’ve seen give some excellent examples, in our younger, more aggressive days. I’ve seen our bass player, Ross, land a couple. In self-defence, I need to add. So it happens, yeah. You’re talking about the city that had a terrorist attack at the airport and the baggage handler kicked the guy in the balls!
POWER is out on Jan 24 on Virgin EMI