Twin Atlantic frontman Sam McTrusty opened up in an interview about his mental health battles while the band toured for fifth album, Power.
Whilst the group were on the road, Sam struggled with an unknown illness and his wellbeing deteriorated as a result.
The 34-year-old revealed he had a "private mental breakdown" during the period.
The Twin Atlantic frontman told NME Magazine: "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.”
However, it was just one battle after another for the band as then the coronavirus pandemic hit - putting a blunt end to all their plans for the foreseeable.
Sam continued: “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]’.”
“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,” he recalls.
“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.” Saying that the “rug was pulled from under our feet."
McTrusty continued: “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 shit, and that’s the reality of being a mid-level band.”
Twin Atlantic's latest Album, Transparency, is out now.
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