Twinning in the name of

Strolling to the Santa Monica studio where his band were recording their debut album, Twin Atlantic’s Sam ‘Yes that is my real name’ McTrusty had the weird experience of passing the headquarters of some of the biggest conglomerates in popular entertainment.

“Across the road from our apartment was the head office of MTV. Beside it were Interscope Records, Viacom, Yahoo Music. They were all in a line. We were at the hub of the music industry, making our record. It was a strange thing to see every morning – all these offices where the walls were papered with platinum albums.”
Stranger yet was working with indie god-head Gil Norton, the Englishman whose hit-cratered CV includes definitive albums by Pixies and Foo Fighters. By all accounts Norton is not the sort to suffer idiots and for Twin Atlantic, four-piece Scottish purveyors of tuneful noise rock just this side of Biffy Clyro, sitting down to work with him was an intimidating experience.

“I think it helped that the first time we met he came to us in Glasgow,” say McTrusty. “He was on our patch, as it were. So we felt more comfortable talking about what we wanted and he was happy to go along with that.”
If there was any moment when the good vibrations between Norton and the group threatened to unravel it was when the notorious perfectionist wanted to descuzz a track called ‘Crash Land’, one of the group’s anthems. Fearful of losing its rough-at-the-edges charm, Twin Atlantic pushed for it to be recorded in one take. Rather than using the state of the art equipment Red Bull had placed at their disposal they instead rigged up some mics in the den.

“Without wishing to be precious, we’ve been playing it for years,” says McTrusty. “A lot of the fans are really attached to it. We didn’t want to lose that live feel. So we dragged all the mics out to the TV room and did it in one take.”
With the music industry slowly – or not so slowly – imploding, Twin Atlantic had little hesitation signing to the vanity label of energy drink giant Red Bull.
“It’s a way for them to build some credibility and we are totally aware of that,” says McTrusty. “But because they have only a few artists on their roster, everyone gets a lot of attention. So far the arrangement has worked out better than we could have imagined.”

An unexpected perk was getting to record in Red Bull’s in-house Santa Monica studio. Those early morning jaunts to work aside, they didn’t see a lot of Los Angeles though. With Norton cracking the whip, opportunities for freestyle frisbee and roller-blading were kept to a minimum.

“We’d heard the stories – ‘Oh, he’s a tyrant’. I genuinely think, though, that because we’re so relaxed as a band that it rubbed off on him a bit. Because we all knew where we wanted to go with the record, it happened extremely smoothly. There weren’t really any bones of contention.”
Besides, by that stage, Twin Atlantic had already gone through the major trauma that informed the record – the decision to scrap an entire album’s worth of material and start writing again.

“Looking back, I suppose it was a big deal. Weirdly, it didn’t really feel that way at the time. It seemed perfectly natural to us. We wrote a bunch of songs. But then we kept writing and we liked the new ones more. We’d never done a full-length album before and the whole thing was a learning process. It wasn’t stressful or anything.”