Saturating UK airwaves through much of 2014 and 2015, for a glorious moment in time, landmark third album Great Divide made Twin Atlantic one of the biggest rock bands in the world. Belated celebrations for that record’s 10th birthday are less about nostalgia, though, and more seeing how it’s soundtracked listeners’ lives, and why its megawatt glow is once again lighting the road ahead...
“In classic support band fashion, our drum kit is broken…”
Sam McTrusty grins wryly from beneath his baseball cap, soaking in the unconditional adulation from a packed-out Barrowland Ballroom. Having supported acts at virtually every other venue in Scotland’s largest city, their hometown of Glasgow, the Twin Atlantic frontman always found it odd that they’d never opened up the most legendary of all. So tonight they’re ‘supporting’ themselves.
“We used to queue up outside to see bands here,” his smile widens. “This will never not be mad!”
Dressed down with Sam stood off to one side and (temporarily frustrated) sticksman Craig Kneale at the other – bassist Ross McNae alongside guitarist Barry McKenna taking centre-stage – Twin’s commitment to the bit is commendable. Racing through the eight tracks of awkward, angular 2009 debut Vivarium, they do a more than passable impression of their greenhorned younger selves.
But as Twin re-emerge after the break, Sam’s cap gone and his hair slicked back as a multicoloured array of flags drop around them, tonight is all about marking a decade of 2014 smash Great Divide.
“Technically it’s not 10 years, it’s 11,” Sam shrugs back in their rehearsal space up north in Springburn. “But, y’know, we announced these shows as part of the 10th anniversary celebrations. And with scheduling and venue availability and everything, we’re just getting around to it now.”
Self-admittedly, Sam is still getting his head around the idea that Twin Atlantic have become a “career band”. Having paused recording of Twin’s new LP for these shows, he’s still caught up in the buzz of creation and innovation. But Twin do have seven records under their belts already. 18 years since they came together, their music has become ingrained in the fabric of Britrock and the thumping soundtrack to this city. So when Red Bull Records plotted an anniversary reissue of Great Divide, and a first-ever vinyl release for Vivarium, they deserved to be celebrated.
“If Vivarium was our first album and [2011’s second album] Free gave us the first real step on the ladder, Great Divide allowed us to climb to the top for a couple of weeks to see what it’s like to be a real ‘Big Dog’ band,” Sam nods. “Its where the penny dropped in my head on how to manipulate people’s emotions through music. It’s where I wasn’t just messing about with my mates in a band because we’d watched a blink-182 music video together. It’s the album where I found my purpose.”
Flitting back and forth between stories from the album’s creation, Sam paints a chaotic patchwork. One moment, Twin are a local band done good. The next, their music is being broadcast into homes around the planet as the soundtrack for Felix Baumgartner’s legendary 24-mile skydive from the stratosphere in 2012. Initial recordings as a close-knit unit with English producer Gil Norton at Rockfield studios in Monmouth, Wales contrasted sharply with Sam being sent off alone to Los Angeles to come up with additional material working alongside Irish fixer Garret “Jacknife” Lee. Harsh words from an unnamed label exec obliquely referring to their first batch of material as “mid-paced muck” left a songwriter who had poured so much of himself into his creations in tears of frustration and pain. But with retrospect Sam sees that maybe it was like a football manager giving his players the hairdryer treatment, sticking the rocket up their asses to get out and hit the back of the net with game-changing singles Hold On and Heart & Soul.
“As soon as I hit that chorus, Hold On felt like someone releasing the pressure valve on everything we’d worked through. I’m not a fan of musicians writing about being in the studio, but it worked out alright for that one. I’ll always remember the first time I played Heart & Soul to the band. They almost dismissed it because it was so different to anything any of our contemporaries were doing. And I remember two members particularly objected to my opening lyrics: ‘I flick the switch on the generator / So I could turn you on’. I wanted to double-down on that 80’s hair metal sound, but they thought it was cock rock: ‘What are you doing man?! My missus listens to this!’”
More telling were the lyrics to first song The Ones That I Love: ‘Music is my therapy / I can listen to it all night long / Casting out the memories / Like a painting or picture I draw…’ Pulled between the working-class experience of growing up in his mum’s council flat and that of attending the buttoned-up Hutchesons Grammar School, the frontman was leading a split life when so many of his peers were finding themselves. After two albums of finding his feet, these were the songs where Sam pinned his colours to the mast. Re-working his favourite song from childhood – Take That’s Back For Good – into the poignant Be A Kid was a clever touch, but there was far deeper self-reflection running through I Am An Animal, Actions That Echo and Why Won’t We Change.
“There was the element of body-swerving depression,” the songwriter nods. “Maybe I’m good at manipulating other people’s emotions through music as I used it to manipulate my own.”
Success was a form of vindication. Selling-out the 14,000-cap (then) SSE Hydro on May 9, 2015 was an obviously climactic moment, but Sam remembers it more as an overblown end-point than a real representation of the excitement of the time: a moment where the Glasgow music scene decided to elevate one of their own rather than the hard-earned milestone it might have seemed.
More seismic was closing the second stage at T In The Park on Saturday July 11 of the same year. “The Hydro didn’t exist when we were kids,” Sam explains, “but everybody went to T In The Park!”
Reliving past glories is not high on the list of priorities for 2025’s anniversary celebrations, mind.
“We’ve always been so focused on going as far as we can as fast as we can,” Sam stresses. “It was really COVID that forced everybody to stop and look back. We first discussed doing anniversary shows for Free, as a way to get out after sitting in the house over two years of lockdown. Rather than selfishly making another record where we sound like a whole new band, we wanted [give the fans what they were craving] and play songs from the album that gave us our career. Then, when we actually did it, it was fucking amazing. We had people coming up to us every night to say things like, ‘This was the album I listened to at uni when I was studying law. Now I’m a lawyer!’ or, ‘I met my wife in 2011 and every time we hear Crash Land it takes us back to when we were first dating!’”
Seeing tears of joy shed across the Barrowlands’ famous sprung dancefloor this evening, Twin’s connection with their listeners is stronger now than ever. Sam met a devotee at a signing the other day with more Twin Atlantic merch than he has. Danielle Wilson, a superfan of hundreds of shows who K! first met at this venue a decade ago is now selling merch for the band. Even the members’ transition into parenthood has emphasised that this music is for others more than themselves.
“Tonight’s setlist has 30 songs in it!” Sam laughs, with bottled oxygen stowed just offstage should he need it. “That’s not for our enjoyment. It’s like a form of torture for us. It’s definitely ego-satisfying, too, though. It’s been hard for us to get to the point of having seven-and-a-half albums but only playing an hour and 20 minutes each night. We’ve not historically shouted about our successes. Back when we started you couldn’t show off, so these shows are a chance for us to flex a bit. Mostly, though, it’s far less about celebrating this band than the journeys our fans have been on in their lives. Seeing and understanding that gives us that greater sense of purpose.”
Having weathered storm over storm over the last few years, Twin feel primed to roar back bigger and bolder than ever. 2016’s GLA was arguably their strongest, most strident release to date, but in its wake experimental double album Power (2020) and Transparency (2022) failed to connect over lockdown and coincided with Craig and Barry stepping away from the band to varying degrees. Last year’s excellent Meltdown was a return to form, inspired by the Free anniversary shows. But their as-yet untitled eighth album promises to be the arena-worthy evolution fans have been waiting for.
“The gut feeling isn’t that we’ve been capsized by a wave. But we’ve been hit by one and only now is it washing over us. We supported McFly this summer, which seemed to (re)introduce us to a whole new audience, and led to the biggest up-tick in social media engagement that we’ve ever seen. That was fucking mad. The [original] band is back as a unit in our own fucked-up way, too, not necessarily as a traditional four-piece, but managing to find ways of working where everyone’s strengths come to the fore. We’ve even actualised the band name, with me living in Canada most of the time these days while the rest of the band are on the opposite side of the Atlantic ocean.”
Sam can’t hide his excitement as he gives us the privilege of hearing a handful of working demos for new music. Comparing the sound of their fresh material to the '70s and '80s recordings of legends like The Who, Fleetwood Mac, Bruce Springsteen and The Cure or a heavier version of the stripped-back simplicity of Bright Eyes and Phoebe Bridgers, it’s clear they’ve made space for a return to Twin’s classic songwriting. There is swagger and heart aplenty in what we hear, as well as hooks as irresistible as those in Twin’s greatest hits. At this point in the game, Twin understand that it’s mostly in the hands of fate whether they return to the heights of Brothers Annd Sisters or Heart & Soul, but with Sam’s beloved Scotland football team gearing up for a run at next year’s World Cup, belief is in plentiful supply and anything is possible.
“Our last three records were more about us surviving than thriving,” he teases. “Now we’ve been given a fresh injection of ambition, seeing how we can straddle different musical worlds and understanding the story that we have to tell. I honestly believe that we’re one of the last acts in the UK that got to experience the ‘classic’ process of becoming a band. We were allowed the naïveté of our first record. We were allowed to learn and grow onstage without the glare of social media. The different sounds we’ve experimented with probably limited our careers at points, but sticking with that approach has kept fans intrigued. We’ve never really worried about being ‘cool’. And our fans have come to appreciate that. Where, once, with us caught between the worlds of rock, pop and alternative, some didn’t have the confidence to declare themselves ‘Twin Atlantic fans’, now they wear it as a badge of honour that they were listening in 2011 and they’re still here.
“Back in 2015, I talked to Kerrang! about how easily writing those big hit songs came to me and the pull to try different things. In some ways, I feel similar today. On the other hand, there haven’t been a lot of bands who’ve managed to do what we did with Great Divide since. There are bands who’ve been marketed better. There are bands better on the visual side of things. But there aren’t many who’ve managed to rely on that same style of classic songwriting as their vehicle to success. We’re not done, either. We’ve finally got our priorities in order. And I genuinely feel like we still have two or three massive songs left to contribute.”
So, could one of those be a Scotland anthem for the World Cup?
“About 20 people have asked me that in the last few weeks,” Sam sidelines the nostalgia to look forward to summer 2026. “I’ve actually got some family involved with the SFA: my brother in-law is like a chief data analyst and my wee cousin is a player liaison. I’m sure they’ve already decided on their song, but if someone came along asking me to write one, I’d definitely have a go!”
Great Divide (10th Anniversary Edition) and Vivarium are both available now via Red Bull Records
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