Twin Atlantic might have travelled around the world, but their hearts will always remain in Glasgow

The local lads release their new album today, and have called it GLA in a nod to their roots here.

Sam McTrusty, Barry McKenna, Ross McNae and Craig Kneale have worked their way from early gigs at King Tut’s to shows at the legendary Barrowland and, on their last tour, a headline slot at the massive SSE Hydro.

Getting back to basics is one theme that runs through the new album for the rockers, while Sam’s own thoughts on Glasgow are most apparent on closing track Mothertongue.

“I wanted to hone in on my personal take on Glasgow,” explains Sam, the group’s singer.

“Glasgow’s obviously my city, but I think a lot of people can relate to it wherever they’re from, because it’s a love/hate thing. You can complain about your home, but you’ll be the first one to defend it when you’re away from there, or feel proud of it. It’s maybe a weird note to leave the album on, but hopefully it’ll make people think about their home town a bit.

“Glasgow has so many different faces and levels. It’s the friendliest place in the world but it can the most threatening at times too – it’s like the film Sliding Doors because you can have a great night out and meet fantastic people, but there’s a dangerous side too, depending on what you do that night. It’s really interesting to us.”

Yet it was one of the band’s biggest triumphs in the city that also posed a problem ahead of recording the album. Previous album Great Divide super-sized the group’s rock and gave it a polish, resulting in catchy pop hits like Brothers and Sisters and Heart and Soul.

It led them to the huge Hydro gig, but it also left the quartet wondering what to do next.

“We hadn’t thought past the Hydro, that was the pinnacle,” explains Ross, the band’s bassist.

“Then once it happened it was ‘what do we do next’? We’d always dreamed of being big enough to play the SECC, before the Hydro was built, but we never actually planned for doing anything after that. So it took a couple of months for us to get over the buzz of it all.”

“What really spawned the whole record was just getting back down to earth after 10 years of pursuing dreams,” adds Sam, picking up the tale.

“We got back to listening to a lot of music and deciding how to make another one, if we decided to do a new album. That sounds like a doomsday cliché but we really didn’t know what to do. We wanted to focus on something this time, because we needed a purpose to make another album.”

Part of that purpose came with embracing different recording techniques. Sam and Ross worked on the songs initially, sending ideas back and forth, before teaming up again with Los Angeles based producer Jacknife Lee, who had worked on Great Divide.

They took on board synths and drum machines, as well as recording their parts separately at times rather than all together. Sam even worked with another writer, Iain Archer, on Mothertongue. However the results are rawer and fresher than Great Divide, from furious album opener Gold Elephant: Cherry Alligator to the glam rock stomp of The Chaser and the screaming defiance of I Am Alive.

“Ross and I had some low budget studio stuff in our flats, and we were just messing around,” says Sam.

“A lot of those ideas then turned into full songs, and that became the template for the final recordings. We tried to do different things – on a song like Excel I was under pressure to do something specific, because Jackknife was pointing out I was doing the same thing over and over vocally, and he was playing me some Kendrick Lamar songs.

“He gave me that and Heroes by Bowie as a bar to meet, so I was trying to do that. That was terrifying, because I was worried I’d let everyone down and not take the next step.”

There remains some familiar things about Twin, though. They’ve always loved playing the Barrowland, and given that they’ve released a record steeped in Glasgow it made sense to return there, with three nights booked in for December.

“The Barrowland is our favourite venue in the world, so it made more sense to go back there, given what the album’s about,” says Ross.

“I remember queuing from midday to see bands there and waiting around afterwards to see them again, as well as drinking too much early on and being sick…

“It’s been part of us since we were so young. There’s so much history there – the Hydro is still fairly new, but with the Barrowland you could bottle the atmosphere there and that would be the essence of this album.”

It seems that the band have found their spark for new again, and are enthused about the future.

“In the past we’ve had too methodical a plan and it becomes too much like the music industry,” says Sam.

“You start choking out the decisions that make you yourself that way, and it stops rock n roll being honest and real. We tried to ignore that aspect this time – we want the album to do well but the most important thing is that it really just re-awakened our love for music.”

GLA is out now.