Transparency
The sixth album by Scottish rockers Twin Atlantic was supposed to be an accompaniment to 2020’s *Power*. But as frontman Sam McTrusty and bassist Ross McNae entered their studio in Glasgow, their muse had abandoned them. “For the first time ever, we weren’t really enjoying what we were doing,” McTrusty tells Apple Music. “Then the pandemic came along and gave us a parachute moment. It allowed us to stop and take stock of everything.” After setting up a home studio in his two-bedroom flat, McTrusty rediscovered his creative spark over nocturnal songwriting sessions with The Killers and U2 producer Jacknife Lee, checking in from his home in the US. They originally planned to do one song, but it soon blossomed into a collection of tracks that would become *Transparency*, Twin Atlantic’s most imaginative and forward-thinking album to date. “Jacknife and I were just having fun,” says McTrusty. “It felt really fresh and fun and exciting. It took my mind off watching the daily briefings and being stuck in the house, because \[shortly before the UK-wide first lockdown\] we’d been playing to a thousand people.” The album that emerged takes in electronic-tinged glam rock, urgent goth-pop, R&B grooves and epic balladeering. “I was just freed,” says McTrusty. “Because we play rock music, there’s some rules there, and we’ve always tried to live on the edge of them, or mix some of the subgenres together. Here, I couldn’t hide behind the fake rock ’n’ roll ego thing, because I was recording it in my flat, with my neighbor through the wall. I couldn’t get to the chorus and fucking wail.” It’s also the most personal record that McTrusty has made. “You know when they do that thing in biology where they slice through someone?” he says. “I’ve just taken a slice of me out. I had a lot to get off my chest from the previous four years and what I was living in, plus my troubled past.” Let McTrusty take you through Twin Atlantic’s bold statement, track by track. **“Keep Your Head Up”** “This was the last song that was written for the record. When we get to the end of an album, I’ll always be like, ‘Man, it\'s missing this type of song,’ and then I’ll very purposefully go and write that exact song. I was trying to sum up everything. The lyrics are about, ‘Fuck, did I have a mental breakdown? And am I still refusing it? And has every song I’ve ever written been about my fractured relationship with my dad, even when I’m saying happy things?’ Probably. I wanted to ground myself in the realest possible conversation I could have. It felt like it was important to start the album with a song that felt vulnerable.” **“One Man Party”** “It’s a funny album, this, because it’s either one extreme or the other, where I’m making fun of myself and making fun of success and wealth and social interaction and then the other half is really self-focused and quite depressing and sad. This is one of the fun ones. I’ve got that inner voice that’s self-deprecating, but I also probably fucking fancy myself a bit to be a singer in a band and get on a stage and tell 50,000 people what to do, so I’m making fun of that and all the little idiosyncrasies that would result in a person thinking that you can hide that.” **“Get Famous”** “This was the first song written in lockdown. Jacknife and I were talking about an Instagram account, Influencers in the Wild, which is people taking selfies or filming a travel blog or doing yoga in the sea, all of the typical things that we’ve come to accept as normal. Totally harmless fun on the face of it, but there’s that darker seedy underbelly to the whole thing that interests me as a people-watcher. I thought maybe I could make fun of that and pick some of the language out and be clever with how I use wordsmithery. It became quite fun, and made us really giddy, nervous giggling wee boys about the song that we were making.” **“Young”** “This existed in the batch of songs post-*Power*, pre-*Transparency*, in the ether. A friend of mine has been in the same group of pals since he was at school and they’re all marrying off and he felt like everyone was just choosing to give up on life, settle down and stop adventuring—a really naive, almost sweet take on life to me. But it was this big debacle in my friendship group: ‘Why did he say it like that? What a fucking selfish prick, does he not know that we are made for each other?!’ and all that. I thought, ‘That\'s really interesting that he has put that like that, I’m just going to tweak this song to have a bit more depth,’ and made the chorus about his way of putting that.” **“Haunt”** “This is taking a view of things that happened when I was my daughter\'s age. Things happened in my family situation that now, as an adult, I can put a different lens of judgment on, where I’m like, ‘I would never in a million years, no matter what, end up in that type of situation.’ It’s something that’s scarred me for a long time and I think it’s the reason I always want to make something new, because it takes my mind off analyzing divorce and family and division between people. The sound at the start is the first time we heard my daughter’s heartbeat at the first maternity appointment, but then at the end it’s her screaming, because she would come into the room I was writing in and always wanted to shout into the mic.” **“Dance Like Your Mother”** “We wanted to have a song that had undeniable groove. If we’d come straight out of *Power* and tried to make this record, it would’ve been so bad. It needed all of these massive things in the world and in our personal lives to go wrong and our business to fall apart because we weren’t able to play gigs. The fact that I was getting to think, ‘Let’s write a song over just 100% groove for four minutes. Can it be done?’ was so much fun because I wasn’t having to think about any of that other stuff.” **“Dirty”** “This was meant to be the lead single on *Power* and someone at our label was like, ‘It\'s too strong. We need to hold it back for Part B once we have people’s attention.’ It wasn’t on this record either until we got to the end and were like, ‘We’re just missing that no-nonsense uptempo song that marries all the groove-based moments.’ At that point, some of the songs that were 100% groove felt a bit out of place, and this maybe merged everything. It’s the sort of song that people have enjoyed about our band from previous records. Maybe we got soft at the end and threw this in to be nice for our existing fans.” **“Bang on the Gong”** “‘Bang on the Gong’ was craving laughter, wanting to have a good time. I was imagining that when this record comes out, maybe people will want to dance and let their hair down and have a bit of fun. It’s got that Detroit, heavy, industrial, funk groove that runs through a lot of the music there. I thought, ‘I come from an industrial, really creative town as well; I wonder if I can just blend being super Glaswegian over that big, muscular grooving.’ My mum’s on it. I was like, ‘What’s the most Glaswegian thing there is?’ Well, when my mum’s annoyed is pretty unbeatable, so I rang her up and said, ‘Remember when you used to shout at me when I was wee? Do that.’ She said all that stuff in one take.” **“It’s Getting Dark”** “This is about how there’s an innocence to ‘If you want this from someone, I’ll be the one to do that for you.’ But then once you dip your toe into that world, where you’ve never felt pain unless you’ve felt love, where the beginning’s really innocent and you want to be in love with someone, it can be one of the more painful experiences—even in the good times. Some of the best times can feel quite melancholy because you’re like, ‘Man, I’ll never be as happy as this ever again.’ I don’t know if that’s just Scottishness. We ended up putting it through a bunch of tape machines and distorting it because the whole song started to become too pretty.” **“Instigator”** “I feel like this is a good message to finish this type of record on, considering that the intro to it feels harrowing. It’s maybe slightly generic, ‘Give me something to believe in,’ but it’s more that you’re searching for something and pursuing something. I’ve realized that is really important for me. And as soon as that isn’t there, life is duller. It took me months to figure out that that was why it was OK to have quite a generic message like that. On a personal level, it started to feel quite powerful.”
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