Russian Circles’ music has always made the case that riffs can tell a story. Throughout a career that spans over two decades, the instru-metal pioneers have pushed their sound in various directions—sometimes flirting with the textural, atmospheric approach of post-rock, but more often using stark arrangements to put their beefed-up riffage in the forefront. That’s the path Russian Circles take on Nine, their ninth album, and one of the trio’s heaviest and most riff-forward to date.
It doesn’t take long for Russian Circles to establish Nine’s forceful tone. On “Empath,” the album’s second track, a series of death and thrash metal riffs bleed into each other until the song reaches a chugged coda that any great hardcore band would gladly use as a breakdown. Guitarist Mike Sullivan has spoken about pulling influence for Nine from veteran death metal bands like Bolt Thrower, Cannibal Corpse, and Morbid Angel, as well as the recently-formed New York hardcore band Crush Your Soul. That influence comes through loudly and clearly on “Empath”; it’s also there in the galloping punk beat of “Borehole,” the swampy groove towards the end of “Meridian,” and the syncopated chugs in “Seventh Seal.” Terms like “post-rock,” “post-metal,” and the aforementioned “instru-metal” are an easy shorthand to describe Russian Circles to the uninitiated, but the band has often carried itself with the ethos, the straightforwardness, and the musical sensibilities of a hardcore band. Nine is a reminder of that.
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Nine is also the first Russian Circles album since bassist Brian Cook dove directly back into the world of hardcore by reuniting with his influential mathcore band Botch for their first shows and new music in 20 years. Did revisiting those songs, and sharing the stage with multiple generations of hardcore greats like Converge and Thirdface, rub off on this material? It certainly sounds like it did. Converge’s Kurt Ballou had his hands in the album as well; it’s the band’s fourth consecutive album that he produced and engineered, and his blunt, bare-bones recording style is perfectly suited to an album where Russian Circles is almost entirely in attack mode. Nine was also, like many Russian Circles albums, largely tracked at Chicago’s Electrical Audio, and I’ll be damned if I can’t hear the ghost of studio founder Steve Albini in those cranium-scraping tones.
But Nine isn’t all mosh fuel and metallic fury. Cook’s pulsating synths on mid-album highlights “Eluvial” and “E2” sound straight out of the ’70s prog era, and the penultimate track “Arletta” is a classical guitar reprieve before the album finishes out on its most punishing note. Just like the intros of Metallica’s Ride the Lightning and Master of Puppets that “Arletta” mirrors, the more understated moments on Nine only make the heavy parts hit harder.
Twenty years removed from their first album, Russian Circles remain remarkably consistent at crafting stark, wordless compositions that enrapture. There are moments on Nine when Russian Circles sound like a traditional power trio—but far more often, all three instrumentalists feed off each other like co-stars in a dramatic play. And while Nine takes its time to unravel, the record is rarely repetitive. The transitions between melodies are seamless but never predictable, bringing the same level of suspense you’d expect from a gripping tale told through words. By the time closer “Seventh Seal” opens with a salvo of bulldozing drums and thrash-sludge guitars that could’ve come from peak-era Mastodon, all the suspense that’s been building across the record is released with Nine’s most brutal payoff.
