Audio recording became choppy and robotic whilst editing???

Hey guys, so I was recording a voice-over for a video using my rode nt usb microphone and recording directly onto an audio track in my premiere project. Once i finished recording, i decided to play the whole audio recording back to make sure i could be understood and hadn't said anything silly, etc. Around 25 minutes into the recording (in total it's around 35-40 minutes long), the audio suddenly became very robotic and choppy and i couldn't really understand anything. So i went back to a part i knew sounded alright, played it again, and it was also choppy. So i decided to just save and close the project (so that i'd still have my audio file) and reopen it. However, when i reopened it, the ENTIRE audio file had that choppy mechanical distortion. In addition to that, when i now try to play my video in premiere, it lags for almost a minute whenever i move the playhead and press play. Idk if this issue is related to the aforementioned one, but i thought i'd bring it up anyway.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance.