Twin Atlantic: “The theme was, ‘Let’s make an album with the most amount of purpose we possibly can’”

“That’s crazy!” exclaims Sam McTrusty. “You’ve caught me off guard there…”

Kerrang! has just put it to the frontman that his band’s new album Meltdown is the perfect Twin Atlantic record. Indeed, in our recent review of LP number seven, we even wrote that it “encompasses the finest attributes from their discography to date”.

For Sam, having spent his morning watching Mary Poppins with his kids before answering our Zoom from all the way in sunny Canada, it takes a few sentences for him to get out of dad mode and into the rock star zone for this chat. We’ve not exactly started out with a nice, humble question to ease him in, we’ll admit.

“Some of our albums we’ve tried to make perfect sidesteps into subgenres of different guitar music that interests us, and we’ve been more obsessed of getting the sonics of it right, or we’ve been more obsessed with getting the messaging or the aesthetic or whatever, you know?” Sam begins, pondering the different ideas of a “perfect” album with his morning coffee.

“On our first album, [2011’s] Free, we were obsessed with being ‘professional’ and sounding like a real band. On [2014’s] Great Divide we were obsessed with the songwriting being perfect in a classic sense, with pop structures and stuff like that. But this album, for the first time we were genuinely obsessing over the album as a whole. And it’s been a journey to figure out how to do that, I suppose…

“I mean, I do agree with you,” he grins. “I don’t know about ‘perfect’, but I do think that it’s our best album! And that’s quite a storied response from a band on their seventh album (laughs). Like, ‘Oh yeah, we’ve made our best album ever!’ Every band says that, but I would stand by that. I think it’s our strongest record, easily.”

Here, we dig into more of that with Sam – from its all-consuming creation, to Twin Atlantic’s sonic nods back to Free, to why, if it’s the last thing they ever do, Meltdown is one hell of a way to go out…

Tell us more about those “obsessions” that have impacted previous Twin albums. How comes they didn’t affect Meltdown?
“Just the years leading up to it. Every album we’ve learned something. I definitely have a massive ego when it comes to playing live shows, but not in the studio at all. I like to learn in the studio, and I like to look back on records and go, ‘Fuck, that was terrible, that part of it. Let’s never do that again!’ So that was definitely the big picture of how we got to making this record. But the short run up to it was, obviously, we were kind of forced to make an album during lockdown to survive – we’ve got families and mortgages, and we’re so, so lucky that being in a band has become our jobs. So we weren’t complaining about doing it, but once we got a couple of years away from that, [I realised that] we made Transparency [2022] in quite a throwaway fashion. I made it in my daughter’s bedroom in lockdown, which was quite a difficult space to be adventurous in (laughs).

“So then when we were able to make a record on our own terms again, I think we really, really dug down into that. And we went even deeper into that bubble – we didn’t work with another producer, we didn’t really send the demos to many people, and that’s why we then set up our own label to put the record out on. All that sort of became the theme of the record: ‘Let’s make an album with the most amount of purpose we possibly can.’ And I think that focused us into making better decisions on the songs and the lyrics and the sonics. We’ve only got ourselves to blame, basically, because we were the only people that had any control over the whole thing. So it was really in response to having to make an album in lockdown, which caused us all to question why we are even in a band, and what we’re really doing.”

You built your own studio for the making of Meltdown. Had you started writing the album, and then just decided to make your lives much harder by also creating a studio at the same time?
“That is a bit of a theme in our band: we’re constantly trying to make it as hard as possible (laughs). Whether it’s my accent, or refusing to leave Glasgow for the first 15 years! But, basically, we had a rehearsal space in Glasgow for 10 years that was a complete dive, and towards the tail-end of its lifespan, we turned it into a recording studio – very loosely. We made our album Power [2020] there, and that gave us a bit of a boost that we can do this sort of on our own. It was worthwhile investment, because our albums before that, we’d had labels spending a lot of money on the making of the album and whatnot. And obviously the music industry is different now, so this was us adjusting to that. Rather than spitting the dummy out, we just doubled-down on it and put all of our personal savings into making it happen. And then during the first lockdowns, because Ross [McNae, bassist] and I had kids and we were staying in flats in Glasgow, and didn’t really have gardens, we sold those and moved out of the city a wee bit. We managed to get a garage each at our new places, and so we converted those into studios as a project to keep us busy when music was shut down.

“It wasn’t the grand plan to then make albums there – it’s just that we were used to having a Twin Atlantic space, and we had given it up. So we converted these garages, and then as the world slowly got back to normal, we figured out that Ross’ daughter goes to nursery on a Tuesday and Thursday, and mine goes on a Monday and Wednesday, so we’d alternate days – I’d go to his house and write songs, and he’d come to mine. We had the equipment from making Power, so the demos started sounding really good straight off the bat. And because we were writing the songs in our own space and in our own time, they were naturally a bit more us.

“By the way, ‘studio’ makes it sound really fancy (laughs). It’s a single-car garage that we soundproofed so that our children can go to bed at night! They’re really, really small rooms, so it’s mad that the album sounds as big as it does. In the liner notes of the record, I literally called mine ‘Garage Rock Studio’ – I’m quite pleased with myself about that!”

Do you have a master plan to become a full-on producer extraordinaire for other bands?
“Well, that is the ultimate goal, I suppose. One of the biggest joys outside of playing live shows, for me, is learning how a studio works, and learning how to work with other people’s emotions and music. Oh my god, it’s more complicated than rocket science sometimes! Because at least there’s a correct answer with science (laughs), but with music you have to try all these options. But I now live in Toronto, and I have a studio here that’s more of a ‘go to the studio’ thing, and have other people come by. I would love to get further down that road, but in this case, they were literally just personal spaces that we needed to survive. It honestly just grew arms and legs by mistake, and learned to walk and talk. And now it’s an album!”

You’d previously spoken about how people wanted you to go back to your roots – which Meltdown does in places. But at the same time, how were you able push things forward? Because this isn’t just pure nostalgia…
“Thank you – that was the goal! I think the years of making records, and specifically our producer Jacknife Lee who we made two-and-a-half albums with, he sort of remoulded us. It’s funny, because our band is very much a straight-up rock band – we’re aware of that, but we’ve sort of been operating like extreme artists in the background! And so we couldn’t allow ourselves to do it nostalgically. Ross would be like, ‘We can’t have backing vocals that sound like that.’ Down to the minutiae of, ‘That sounds too pop-punk.’ We found a middle ground where it was like, ‘If we don’t dip our toe in that area and nod to it, that’s also disingenuous.’

“We had a reference point, which was, ‘Could you imagine playing this on an outdoor stage at night-time?’ A lot of nostalgic records are like, ‘You’re playing to 300 people, and the dressing room’s a shithole, and the floor’s sticky.’ Whereas we made sure that, although it’s a bit of a throwback, we still wanted to have that ambition. When we made Free and Vivarium [2009] we were trying to show off. We were trying to prove that we were knowledgeable about our instruments and the effects we were using, just so that our peers would be like, ‘Fuck, these guys are good!’ So on this record we wanted it to translate on a big scale, and be digestible through a massive PA, basically.

“And that’s us leaning towards wanting to play bigger shows again. We would be lying if we said, ‘We want to play small shows!’ We want bigger shows, so let’s try with a bit of purpose to make a bit of a throwback record, but also sounding like we’ve actually learned how to do it over the years. Instead of leaning away from the fact that we’re older, and pretending that it’s scrappy and youthful, it’s like, ‘Nah, we know what we’re doing! We’re in our mid-to-late 30s, and don’t be ashamed of that.’”

What are your hopes for the album? It seems like you’ve already achieved what you wanted to in terms of your aims for it and the pride you feel, so does anything else even matter?
“Honestly, no. We’ve still got massive financial chaos going on in our band, and it’s threatening to pull us under – honestly, it’s like, ‘Today could be the day.’ We wake up with that ongoing pressure from COVID, because we put an album out and then three weeks later lockdown happened, and then we doubled-down and made another record. We got stuck in a bit of a merry-go-round that we can’t really get off. And so I just cannot believe that we made this record! If this is our last-ever album, we managed to bookend our career, and it gives us quite an insane self-satisfaction. When you look at the journey of the albums, we do feel like quite accomplished – and I know I’m blowing my own trumpet there. But we feel already like the album has more than overachieved, on a personal level.

“But I’m not gonna lie: I would love some noise made about the record. And I’d love to play bigger shows again – even just one more time, because I feel like our band makes more sense on a grander scale. Just like the type of songs we’ve got translate in better and bigger spaces, and the type of frontman show – I don’t even know why I do it, I can’t help it! – makes sense when the rooms are bigger and there’s a light show and video screens and all that stuff. I really feel like that’s when the band is in the place it’s meant to be.”

“Last-ever album” and “bigger shows one more time” aren’t things we were expecting to hear, we’ll be honest…
“No, but it’s not a coincidence that it’s come after the music industry shutting down – it was the first thing to shut down, and the last thing to come back. It’s been an absolute nightmare, and continues to be. And so many of our peers that are more successful than us have had to call it a day. But the way that we really look at it is that my whole adult life, from the age of basically 19, this is the only job that I’ve ever had. I’m so fucking spoiled and lucky! From the age of 20 to my early 30s our band continually kept getting bigger – we were doing new things and going to all corners of the world, and it’s just been absolutely insane. It’s an amazing decade of my life that I got away with (laughs).

“And so now, this part of the band, we really needed to dig down and work at it. I don’t know if it’s the Glaswegian work ethic kicking in or something, being like, ‘Fuck it, we’ll do it! We’ll produce it, we’ll engineer the record, we’ll be the record label.’ Ross is basically a tour manager and accountant. We’re doing it all ourselves, but I don’t know how long we can sustain that for. If this album was to have the band take even a little upturn, then we would definitely make another record. But as things stand right now, it’s probably not realistic. We do like that our band is a bit of underdog success story, and we made this many records and stayed true to our roots. But I don’t think it’s sustainable this way for much longer, which is a shame. But never say never – I want to make more!”

Meltdown is out now via Staple Diet. Twin Atlantic tour the UK in November – get your tickets here.

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