After six years on the road, the Irish indie band couldn’t stand to be in the same room. But thanks to DIY and yoga, they’re back – and warming up for a tour disguised as their own tribute act

As cover bands go, Tudor Cinema Club are pretty convincing. Walking on stage at a rammed Whelan’s in Dublin, their bassist and guitarist are the spitting image of Two Door Cinema Club’s Kevin Baird and Sam Halliday. Their renditions of Two Door favourites Undercover Martyn, Something Good Can Work and Next Year are note-perfect. They’re virtually identical, bar the fact that the frontman looks nothing like Two Door’s Tintinesque singer, Alex Trimble. With his 60s rock lizard attire and floppy ginger hair, this guy looks like Jim Morrison had a baby with Kevin the Teenager.

But it really is him, and Tudor Cinema Club really is TDCC, warming up for a set of dates in Mexico with a secret three-date tour of Ireland under the guise of their own tribute act. Maybe that’s the best way to return, because having formulated an intricate new strain of modernist indie akin to a pop radio Foals, and ascended to arena status via the fan-driven success of 2010 debut Tourist History and its No 2 follow-up Beacon, word around 2014 was that Two Door had shut down the projectors.

“We pretty much despised one another by the end,” Trimble nods, lounging beside his bandmates back in their Dublin hotel. “We pushed it too hard for too long. Together 24/7, almost 365 days a year, we were doing over 200 shows a year plus the travelling, records and video shoots – we were never apart. It was physically and mentally draining, and we got that point in early to mid-2013 where we all agreed that it just wasn’t worth it. We didn’t want to be around one another for a very long time.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘And we did have the conversation about a year and a half later, when we got back together and said, Is this something that we want to get back into?’ Photograph: Mark Duggan/The Guardian

There were rumours they had split. “It never came to a proper breakup but we did get together and say, ‘We need to go away and not speak for a long time.’ And we did have the conversation about a year and a half later, when we got back together and said, ‘Is this something that we want to get back into?’”

Their issues? The hothouse of six years on the road amplified their differing personalities – Baird the anxiety-stricken hedonist, Halliday the well-pressed homebody, Trimble the aspiring art polymath – to the point where they were constantly treading on eggshells. Plus, their competitive streak, judging themselves against their contemporaries in terms of sales, shows and attention, had turned them into the rock equivalent of steroid-pumped Russian child gymnasts.

“It’s not about those people, it’s not about that band, it’s about winning,” Baird explains. “I didn’t really enjoy playing a show or making music, I just wanted to do better than everyone else, and that becomes really unfulfilling.”

“We sacrificed so much of our lives to just keep getting better and bigger,” Trimble adds. “We ruined ourselves through pitting ourselves against others, but also against ourselves. It’s hard to constantly keep beating yourself.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Alex Trimble at Lollapalooza in 2013. Photograph: Scott Legato/FilmMagic

Having plunged straight out of the same County Down grammar school into the grinding maw of the music industry, they knew nothing else of adult life; Two Door had become a totem to which they obsessively sacrificed all relationships, home security and personal development until it consumed and defined them entirely. When the touring came to an end, culminating at the O2 Arena in December 2013, they simply didn’t know who they were outside the band.

Trimble purses his lips. “We nearly killed ourselves and we nearly killed each other.” Was it a passive-aggressive period or did you just leather each other? “It was passive-aggressive central,” he says. “You could just feel the tension in the room.”

Baird chuckles. “It would have hurt a lot less if it was fist fights.”

Things came to a head when the band were forced to cancel a headline set at Latitude 2014 because Trimble was having a mental and physical meltdown. “I was depressed and stressed, so I ended up with stomach ulcers,” he says. “I wasn’t mentally prepared to go back into what had been hell for quite a long time, so on the buildup to that my health deteriorated. It got so bad that I missed my flight to London for the rehearsals, so the two guys and our manager flew out to come and meet me because I needed an escort, I couldn’t make it on my own. I collapsed on the way over and the day after I arrived in London I was admitted to hospital and stayed there for two weeks. [The gig] just wasn’t physically possible. So we decided to take a clean break until we were all prepared, if we were ever going to be prepared.”

For 18 months, Two Door Cinema Club went their very separate ways. “We all definitely, on one level or other, had an identity crisis,” Baird says. “We needed to force some self-discovery.” Baird moved to LA, quit drugs, “had some battles with mental health”, mellowed out and found a fiancee. Halliday settled in London to get married, play football and work on his DIY and culinary skills. Trimble, meanwhile, became the latest UK rock star to join the Portlandia set, relocating to Oregon’s bohemian enclave and instantly becoming a pill-popping recluse.

“I had some drug addictions for a while, and a booze addiction,” he says. “A lot of pills. I went through a lot of depression, so there was a lot of prescription medication, things like Valium and Xanax, anything that’ll zonk you out for a little while, and I smoked more than enough weed and drank all at the same time, all day, every day. I didn’t leave the house for about a year, I just stayed jacked up all day.”

He was saved from becoming the Ulster Howard Hughes by working on photography projects – his debut exhibition, Mustang Margaritas, collected pictures he had taken on a US road trip with Belfast photographer Jamie William – and a burgeoning interest in eastern religious and philosophical texts. In the tour bus to Whelan’s, he enthuses about Paramahansa Yogananda’s 1946 spiritual road trip, Autobiography of a Yogi, and he credits discovering the Wim Hof method of intense meditation as “transformative”. Today, he’s the image of the readjusted, unconstrained, chakra-aligned artiste.

“I think there’s a little bit of a hippy inside me somewhere that’s been allowed to breathe some fresh air,” he says. “I thrive on just making things, whether that’s music, or art, or writing. I’ve got the space and freedom to just do stuff for my own enjoyment. I’m happier, more fulfilled than I’ve ever been just being able to make things every day and not feel guilty or restricted.”

Withdrawals conquered, pavlovas perfected and third eyes squeegeed, the group reconvened in mid-2015 and found that they still had new doors to open. Writing their third album, Gameshow, via Skype and email gave them the distance they needed to push beyond what Trimble calls the “lowest common denominator” TDCC sound. Free of anxiety and self-consciousness while recording with Beacon producer Jacknife Lee at his studio in Topanga, LA, they crafted their most varied and engrossing record yet, exploring krautrock, neosoul, disco and future funk and referencing Can, Prince, Madonna, Scissor Sisters, Hot Chip, the Bee Gees and “late McCartney”. “There’s a lot of very safe music out there,” Trimble says. “That’s the kind of stuff that seems to be dominating right now. We wanted to have some fun and do something that was truly interesting.”

To be fair, many of today’s safe chart bands of the moment simply took their formula of crystalline alt-indie and ran with it. Bastille are your fault, right? “Probably, yeah. Our second album is a perfect example. I still believe there are good songs on that record, but it was an incredibly safe record. We didn’t want to offend each other and we didn’t want to offend anyone else. So we probably are partly to blame for what’s happened.”

Just as Beacon included real-life stories of psychedelic experiences at Mexican pyramids and fights with homeless people, the new album has a revealing autobiographical bent, detailing the industry machinations that forced them to go away to find themselves, and what they found there. “Almost all of the album is in some way about ego and identity and finding your place in the world,” Trimble says, forgetting that it also snipes at the music biz like Azealia Banks wronged. The compulsive title track attacks the whole “fickle, false, fleeting” pop charade, Trimble declaring: “I’m made of plasticine, I’m a Pinocchio.” You felt forced to lie about yourself?

“Yeah, we absolutely were,” he admits. “I felt like I was taking far too much advice from other people that didn’t really work for me, because it was expected. Whether that was showing up for a TV show I didn’t want to go on or wearing some clothes I didn’t want to wear. I let myself be moulded and it took me out of who I was.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest At Glastonbury in 2013. Photograph: Samir Hussein/Redferns via Getty Images

The single Are We Ready? (Wreck) is a staccato funk-pop hit about Trimble’s internal 404 error. “I’m not really on the internet,” he says. “It’s an all-consuming force. My brain would be fried every single day because there would be so much information everywhere. There’s a hundred bands that you should listen to, a hundred TV shows that you should have watched. It’s so stressful, this insane abundance of mostly nonsense that floats around the internet. I’m a lot happier when I’m living in the real world. I don’t fit in with a lot of what’s going on now. I don’t relate to pop culture. That worried me for a very long time and made me feel like a bit of an outcast, that I was doing something wrong. I discovered this term weltschmerz, the German word for being at odds with the world around you. The fact that it was a fully coined term made me feel it was OK to not exist on the same level as everyone else, it was OK to be comfortable doing your own thing.”

The club-friendly Bad Decisions also claims you’ve “had enough of the information generation”. Has the web driven society awry? “Yeah,” Trimble says. “Over the years, I saw how affected some of the kids were that would come to shows. On Twitter, there would be a lot of fans that were aggressively excited. They’ll say some of the most outrageous things, and I would recognise them at the shows – they’re like a shell of how they exist online. They’ve no real social skills, there’s no eye contact, they can’t maintain a conversation. I see a whole generation that ... it’s kind of damning to say that they’re ruined, but something to that effect. There’s almost a schizophrenic thing happening where there is a fully-formed existence online that’s so far removed from the real world.”

Youth is no longer about discovering who you are, it’s about promoting yourself.

Halliday nods. “Building a brand.”

Baird laughs at the pessimism. “I’m sure that in the 1890s it was people sitting around going: ‘Vinyl’s going to kill musicians and orchestras.’ People love to have that ‘everything’s fucked’ attitude.”

Everything, that is, except Two Door. “It’s so good to be back together,” Trimble beams. “So far, the shows have been so much fun, and we’re enjoying each other’s company. It’s nice to have a somewhat healthy relationship again. This isn’t a contractual obligation, we’re doing it for pleasure.”

3D glasses on, grab your popcorn, there are enthralling twists in the new reel.