“We've been in the music industry for over 10 years now,” Twin Atlantic frontman Sam McTrusty tells Apple Music. “When we started making this album, so much stuff behind the scenes happened—we changed record labels, we changed management, and it started feeling like we needed a fresh take on things. That bred confidence in the studio.” That freedom led the three-piece to build their own studio at home in Glasgow and produce Power themselves, experimenting with equipment and adding synths to their bombastic guitars and choruses. “We took a lot of influence from Depeche Mode, LCD Soundsystem, and Genesis,” reveals McTrusty. “The list is so long, I could keep listing all the different artists [that inspired us]—they’re rock bands, but they're electronica, too.” Here McTrusty guides us through the making of Power, track by track. Oh! Euphoria! “This song felt like a nice cross-section of everything that we were playing with. There's an element of surrealism, which is playful, and that was a good example of how I was just a bit more free with the words. But it also just sounds fun and punchy, so we felt like it was a good way to open our record.” Barcelona “The lyric comes from the fact the city is a lot of people’s first ‘couples holiday’—you get a cheap flight and it's kind of classy. You're in the middle of feeling like you're falling in love with someone, and then you think, 'Oh, fuck, Barcelona, man, we could go there! I’ll get a flight for 30 quid.’” Novocaine “I was forcing myself to be more honest and open. The song tells the story of the most intimate connection I’ve ever felt with someone else—when I first met my wife. It embarrasses us in some ways that we fell victim to such a clichéd ‘movie script’ love story, but equally it amazes us that it ever happened.” Mount Bungo “I wanted to have this reset after a few songs, because albums build and go on a journey. I was trying to write with colors in mind, and 'Barcelona' is a very dramatic explosion of warm colors, so I thought this needed a horrible neon pink and brown moment. The title comes from the parts of Glasgow called Mount Florida and Strathbungo; people always think those names are mental, so I just thought it was funny to include them on the record.” I Feel It Too “This was us trying to blend in the Glasgow club scene with the band. It was one of the first songs where we realized we could fuse the two things together. We've never really been able to flex that sort of creative muscle before, because we were working in the studio with different producers. Ross [McNae, bass/keyboards] and I have talked for years about doing that as a side project with drum machines and stuff, so this was a bit of a breakthrough, a big moment for us creatively.” Ultraviolet Truth “Ross and I always try to write songs that capture that exact moment where you've been out to a show, a bar, you think it's a good idea to go to a club. And then you end up back at someone's house, and before you know it, it's getting light the next morning. You’re out of it, and you realize: ‘Where am I, man? Whose house is this?’ That's a very particular feeling, where darkness and euphoria cross over—and that was a real theme on the record.” Asynchronus “We love ambient music, and we love movie soundtracks. Ross grew up playing piano, and he's kind of fallen in and out of love with it over the years. The song felt like another point in the record where you wanted to completely shift people's interest, you get to a point and there's a moment of release.” Volcano “‘Volcano’ is probably one of the oldest songs that made it onto the record. I think we wrote that the week after we stopped touring the last album [2016’s GLA], and that's probably why it's still got that real rock-stomper feel. The hip-hop thing you're hearing is just a kind of attitude, and we just tried to be as inclusive of all of our taste as we could be, instead of respecting the [rock] genre too much.” Messiah “I had this huge thing for Depeche Mode—like, I fucking went so deep, man. I just felt like, ‘Ah, I wish there was a band like that again.’ It's a dark time that we're living in, and this song just sounds like someone who is afraid and worried. I think that's probably why Depeche Mode are resonating with me as a music fan, because it is quite a worrying time to live in and, for whatever reason, the tone of their band was just like satisfying a turmoil for me.” Praise Me “We went on a bit of an experiment with ‘Praise Me.’ The original version is very, very tame and not heavy at all. We were meant to go and write an acoustic pop song for some other artist and we ended up writing this big, dark fucking megalithic rock song. We took it home and added heavy guitar riffs and a lot more of the distorted production—we went fucking Metallica on it.”