On ‘Nine’, the Chicago trio put two decades of shared experience to work on sharper riffs, restless electronics and a renewed appetite for impact. Knowing their way around has given them reasons to take another turn.
Being an established band comes with certain expectations. Celebrate the anniversary. Discuss the legacy. Reassure everyone that the important record still sounds exactly as they remember it.
Russian Circles made another album. Their ninth. They called it ‘Nine’, leaving the more elaborate decisions for the music.
Released through Sargent House (Botch, Brutus, Emma Ruth Rundle, The Armed, TTNG…), it finds Mike Sullivan, Brian Cook and Dave Turncrantz confronting an interesting advantage: they know how to do this. Years of writing and touring have given them a shared understanding of tension, space and physical force.
That familiarity can make a band fluent. It can also make the next move a little too obvious.
When does knowing exactly what you’re doing become the reason to try something else?
On ‘Nine’, the answer begins with attack. Sullivan’s interest in death metal gives the guitar a more cutting vocabulary, while hardcore’s rhythmic immediacy pulls the arrangements towards bodily response. “Empath” makes the connection particularly clear: riffs develop through tightening pressure before arriving at a closing groove with very little interest in your seated listening posture.
There’s plenty to examine. Your neck may prefer to proceed without the committee.
The compelling part is how those instincts enter an already developed musical relationship. Cook’s bass gives a passage its own movement rather than merely adding weight beneath the guitar. Turncrantz can redirect that movement through an accent or a change in attack. Sullivan can leave a melodic figure hanging while the ground shifts underneath it.
Three people can make an enormous sound. Making that sound feel alive requires them to keep responding.
Cook’s return to Botch is an intriguing part of the surrounding story, but treating the reunion as an explanation for every aggressive riff would be a little convenient. What matters here is the trio’s continued interest in music with an immediate physical consequence. Their arrangements can be patient without asking the listener to admire patience as an achievement in itself.
Post-metal has occasionally mistaken elapsed time for emotional depth. Russian Circles give the waiting something to do.
The electronics expand that possibility. On “Eluvial” and “E2”, repeating synth patterns introduce another pulse for the musicians to work around. They alter the sense of motion and the space available to the other instruments.
A band can develop without announcing that it has entered its experimental era. Sometimes somebody brings a different sound, and everybody else finds something useful to do with it.
That same curiosity makes the quieter choices count. The nylon-string guitar of “Arletta” changes the scale of the record before “Seventh Seal” brings its driving, thrash-edged force into view. The impact grows because the listener’s ears have briefly been elsewhere.
A considerate pause. The subsequent behaviour is considerably less considerate.
These musicians know their shared language well enough to keep stretching it. Death-metal attack gives it bite; synths open another route; restraint makes the return to force matter.
Twenty years together. Nine albums in. Apparently, this still needs to get louder.
