Glaswegian Twin Atlantic frontman Sam McTrusty has spoken openly about struggling with his mental health while on tour with his band in March 2020.
In an interview with NME Sam, 34, said: “I had a kind of private mental breakdown – I mean, they’re all serious in their own right, but I’m still downplaying it.
"It’s such an alien concept to me. I hit a brick wall in my mind, then my mind was shutting down my body.
"We were having doctors come out to the studio, and I was trying to walk on stage saying to the guys, ‘I can’t f****** do that, I’m going to faint, I’m going to be sick’.
“Still to this day, I don’t really know what that was.”
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Adding to the pressure of the situation, the start of the Covid-19 pandemic meant that all of the band's upcoming live gigs were cancelled with next to no warning.
Sam said: “Then it was, ‘Oh, my god, I’m gonna be bankrupt next week.
"We can’t tour, we’re not doing any festivals. Everything’s f*****.'
“I just wasn’t really in control of my thoughts, I don’t think.
"A year later I was reading back through the lyrics like, ‘Oh my god, man, you were really decompressing, organising your mind and coming to terms with a lot of things on the introspective songs [on the record]’.”
It was an understandably tense time for Sam and the band who were still processing the uncertainty caused by the end of their working relationship with a major music label.
He said: “We couldn’t just be like, ‘F*** it, we’ll take two years off’. We didn’t have a choice.
"We’d just got dropped by our label at the time as well, which was a bit of a curveball for us”
“That was a gut punch: to be in the midst of trying to fix something to then be dropped by basically the biggest record label in the world.”
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Although Sam acknowledges that he was in a unique position, he hopes that the raw honesty of his lyrics will shine through on the new Twin Atlantic album, Transparency.
He said: “I know this sounds like, ‘Oh f****** poor us, boo-hoo, I’m in a band’.
"That’s like 10 million people around the planet’s dream job and I get to do it so I’m not looking for sympathy, just trying to tell the truth.
"That is why we made the album: we needed it because [we had] bills to pay and s***, and that’s the reality of being a mid-level band.”
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