Thursday, November 5th, 2026 6:30PM Roseland Theater All Ages General Admission Floor | 21 & Over Reserved Seating Balcony No refunds or exchanges. Tickets are non-transferable. Will Call name changes not permitted. Print at home tickets can be...
Halfway through the four-year touring cycle for their eighth full-length record Gnosis, Chicago-based instrumental trio Russian Circles hit the two-decade anniversary of their formation. One might expect a band to capitalize on such a major milestone. Instead, guitarist Mike Sullivan, drummer Dave Turncrantz, and bassist/keyboardist Brian Cook spent 2024 unceremoniously touring in support of their most recent album across Australia, South America, Europe, and North America. After all, this is the work ethic that built Russian Circles into one of the biggest heavy instrumental rock bands in the world. This is a band with no hit songs. No fan consensus on their best album. Just a reputation for consistency and quality.
Not that things haven’t changed in the last 22 years. The band is now spread out between Chicago, Los Angeles, and a rural island off the coast of Seattle. While the trio insists their music is a confluence of broad-ranging influences-the formidable Touch & Go artists of the Midwest, the prog giants of late ’60s and early ’70s England, the hypnotic motorik and kosmische grooves of West Germany, the international underground’s most caustic strains of metal-it is fair to say Russian Circles’ adventurous diversity has evolved into its own distinct sound. As one of the notoriously press-shy members anonymously mentioned, “the music we make is a collective process of reconciliation, navigation, and reflection upon aging both as individuals and as a creative entity. Life has created very real distances between us, but the band continues to be at the center, and this creative collaboration is a way of charting the passage of time while also giving us a reason to look to the future.” On their latest album, Nine, the band triangulates their relative positions into singular seismic long-form album-oriented soundtracks to the trials and tragedies of life in the modern age.
For Nine, Russian Circles adhered to their strategy from Blood Year (2019) and Gnosis (2022) by teaming up with engineer Kurt Ballou (Converge, Mastodon, High on Fire). Basic tracking took place at Electrical Audio in Chicago while the finishing touches occurred at Ballou’s GodCity Studio in Salem, Massachusetts. Recording at Electrical Audio allowed the band to retain a thread to their earliest endeavors, with the band having recorded at Steve Albini’s exalted studio as far back as their debut album Enter (2006). The relationship with Ballou is a more recent development stemming back to the band’s sixth album Guidance (2016), owing to his ability to highlight the weight and entropy of metal and hardcore bands in their natural environment while enhancing the clarity and articulation often lost in walls of distortion.
Nine continues Russian Circles’ unhurried evolution and disciplined refinement, leaning into their strengths while pushing at the boundaries of their sound. Album opener “Borehole” offers what might be the band’s closest approximation of a traditional rock song schematic, with a structure of repeating parts that takes the listener on a journey promising hope only to bring them full circle to the dark, desolate, and dystopian futility of the song’s namesake: Russia’s abandoned Kola Superdeep Borehole. From there, the band launches into a ferociously concise overview of metal battle tactics with “Empath”-where a Godflesh-style bass crunch and tornado siren drone ushers in thrash-inspired guitars, venomous black metal attacks, d-beat forays, a deliciously knuckleheaded hardcore breakdown, and a final scorched earth war metal riff, all in just under five minutes. Side A closes with Nine‘s grand centerpiece-the patiently cataclysmic “Eluvial.” Centered around the kind of ping-ponging delayed guitar patterns that Brian Eno and The Edge developed for The Joshua Tree, guitarist Mike Sullivan slowly unfurls a winding, linear melody against the backdrop of drummer Dave Turncrantz’s Latin-rhythm-inspired groove and Brian Cook’s pairing of grinding bass and stuttering electronics. “Eluvial” slowly builds to an apex, leaving only the vaguest breadcrumb trail of obscured percussive and melodic motifs to the song’s final cleansing tempest.
The latter half of Nine builds on Russian Circles’ aural expansion. Side B opens with bottom-end synth pulses, dubby bass lines, serpentine finger-tapped guitar patterns, and nimble rhythmic shifts on “E2.” On “Meridian,” the band once again employs the slow-build strategies of their post-rock inclinations, with Turncrantz’s propulsive drums and Sullivan’s Steve Reich-esque arpeggios giving the song a sense of constant forward momentum, perfectly suited for gliding along the expressways of towering metropolises on neon nights. The album ends with the light and dark contrast of “Arletta” and “Seventh Seal.” Much like Cliff Burton-era Metallica’s penchant of pairing melancholic classical guitar passages with the blunt force trauma of their heaviest tracks, so does the stark beauty of Sullivan’s nylon string solo composition usher in the band’s most unapologetically straightforward metallic assault.
The album art for Nine consists of photographs of Snowpile for Chicago, a sculpture by Tony Tasset that’s been on display in the windows of Chicago Public Library’s West Town Branch since 2004-the year Russian Circles formed. Constructed out of cast bronze, brass, fiberglass, resin, and oil paint, Snowpile for Chicago is a convincing recreation of the mounds of dirty snow that occupy city streets throughout Midwest winters. The inclusion of this image is partially a nod to the band’s hometown, but more importantly serves as an analogy for Russian Circles’ music. It’s a meticulously crafted piece that documents a cold, harsh, and ugly reality. Even though this artifact captures something that is unpleasant, its rendering by human hands gives it a quality of striking beauty. There is a larger conversation to be had about transgressive art, ephemera, the devaluing of art in a cultural landscape that craves constant content, the advent of AI in creative realms, and the general sense of futility that looms over musicians in the modern age, but as an instrumental band, Russian Circles opt to plant these notions in the listeners’ heads through the image of a haunting sculpture in a stark interior space rather than through crafting online manifestos, social media rants, or topical lyrics.
Reinvention is unnecessary when the path forward has always been an open horizon. When it comes to Russian Circles, you can go back through their catalog and find a vast array of moods, stylistic shifts, and timbral experiments across any given album, yet there has been a noticeable progression in the overall experience of taking in any one of their albums as a whole. Whereas earlier albums were almost playful in their traversing of territories, Nine is a document of a band that knows the lay of the land and is fortifying their dominion over the varied terrain.
BandCamp: https://russiancircles.bandcamp.com/ X: https://x.com/russiancircles Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/russiancircles Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/RussianCircles/Halfway through the four-year touring cycle for their eighth full-length record Gnosis, Chicago-based instrumental trio Russian Circles hit the two-decade anniversary of their formation. One might expect a band to capitalize on such a major milestone. Instead, guitarist Mike Sullivan, drummer Dave Turncrantz, and bassist/keyboardist Brian Cook spent 2024 unceremoniously touring in support of their most recent album across Australia, South America, Europe, and North America. After all, this is the work ethic that built Russian Circles into one of the biggest heavy instrumental rock bands in the world. This is a band with no hit songs. No fan consensus on their best album. Just a reputation for consistency and quality.
Not that things haven't changed in the last 22 years. The band is now spread out between Chicago, Los Angeles, and a rural island off the coast of Seattle. While the trio insists their music is a confluence of broad-ranging influences-the formidable Touch & Go artists of the Midwest, the prog giants of late '60s and early '70s England, the hypnotic motorik and kosmische grooves of West Germany, the international underground's most caustic strains of metal-it is fair to say Russian Circles' adventurous diversity has evolved into its own distinct sound. As one of the notoriously press-shy members anonymously mentioned, 'the music we make is a collective process of reconciliation, navigation, and reflection upon aging both as individuals and as a creative entity. Life has created very real distances between us, but the band continues to be at the center, and this creative collaboration is a way of charting the passage of time while also giving us a reason to look to the future.' On their latest album, Nine, the band triangulates their relative positions into singular seismic long-form album-oriented soundtracks to the trials and tragedies of life in the modern age.
For Nine, Russian Circles adhered to their strategy from Blood Year (2019) and Gnosis (2022) by teaming up with engineer Kurt Ballou (Converge, Mastodon, High on Fire). Basic tracking took place at Electrical Audio in Chicago while the finishing touches occurred at Ballou's GodCity Studio in Salem, Massachusetts. Recording at Electrical Audio allowed the band to retain a thread to their earliest endeavors, with the band having recorded at Steve Albini's exalted studio as far back as their debut album Enter (2006). The relationship with Ballou is a more recent development stemming back to the band's sixth album Guidance (2016), owing to his ability to highlight the weight and entropy of metal and hardcore bands in their natural environment while enhancing the clarity and articulation often lost in walls of distortion.
Nine continues Russian Circles' unhurried evolution and disciplined refinement, leaning into their strengths while pushing at the boundaries of their sound. Album opener 'Borehole' offers what might be the band's closest approximation of a traditional rock song schematic, with a structure of repeating parts that takes the listener on a journey promising hope only to bring them full circle to the dark, desolate, and dystopian futility of the song's namesake: Russia's abandoned Kola Superdeep Borehole. From there, the band launches into a ferociously concise overview of metal battle tactics with 'Empath'-where a Godflesh-style bass crunch and tornado siren drone ushers in thrash-inspired guitars, venomous black metal attacks, d-beat forays, a deliciously knuckleheaded hardcore breakdown, and a final scorched earth war metal riff, all in just under five minutes. Side A closes with Nine's grand centerpiece-the patiently cataclysmic 'Eluvial.' Centered around the kind of ping-ponging delayed guitar patterns that Brian Eno and The Edge developed for The Joshua Tree, guitarist Mike Sullivan slowly unfurls a winding, linear melody against the backdrop of drummer Dave Turncrantz's Latin-rhythm-inspired groove and Brian Cook's pairing of grinding bass and stuttering electronics. 'Eluvial' slowly builds to an apex, leaving only the vaguest breadcrumb trail of obscured percussive and melodic motifs to the song's final cleansing tempest.
The latter half of Nine builds on Russian Circles' aural expansion. Side B opens with bottom-end synth pulses, dubby bass lines, serpentine finger-tapped guitar patterns, and nimble rhythmic shifts on 'E2.' On 'Meridian,' the band once again employs the slow-build strategies of their post-rock inclinations, with Turncrantz's propulsive drums and Sullivan's Steve Reich-esque arpeggios giving the song a sense of constant forward momentum, perfectly suited for gliding along the expressways of towering metropolises on neon nights. The album ends with the light and dark contrast of 'Arletta' and 'Seventh Seal.' Much like Cliff Burton-era Metallica's penchant of pairing melancholic classical guitar passages with the blunt force trauma of their heaviest tracks, so does the stark beauty of Sullivan's nylon string solo composition usher in the band's most unapologetically straightforward metallic assault.
The album art for Nine consists of photographs of Snowpile for Chicago, a sculpture by Tony Tasset that's been on display in the windows of Chicago Public Library's West Town Branch since 2004-the year Russian Circles formed. Constructed out of cast bronze, brass, fiberglass, resin, and oil paint, Snowpile for Chicago is a convincing recreation of the mounds of dirty snow that occupy city streets throughout Midwest winters. The inclusion of this image is partially a nod to the band's hometown, but more importantly serves as an analogy for Russian Circles' music. It's a meticulously crafted piece that documents a cold, harsh, and ugly reality. Even though this artifact captures something that is unpleasant, its rendering by human hands gives it a quality of striking beauty. There is a larger conversation to be had about transgressive art, ephemera, the devaluing of art in a cultural landscape that craves constant content, the advent of AI in creative realms, and the general sense of futility that looms over musicians in the modern age, but as an instrumental band, Russian Circles opt to plant these notions in the listeners' heads through the image of a haunting sculpture in a stark interior space rather than through crafting online manifestos, social media rants, or topical lyrics.
Reinvention is unnecessary when the path forward has always been an open horizon. When it comes to Russian Circles, you can go back through their catalog and find a vast array of moods, stylistic shifts, and timbral experiments across any given album, yet there has been a noticeable progression in the overall experience of taking in any one of their albums as a whole. Whereas earlier albums were almost playful in their traversing of territories, Nine is a document of a band that knows the lay of the land and is fortifying their dominion over the varied terrain.
BandCamp:https://russiancircles.bandcamp.com/The self-proclaimed "Kings of Goblin Metal," Los Angeles, California's Nekrogoblikon are melodic hard rock pranksters who deploy gnarly death metal earworms filled with crafty hooks, claw-pumping choruses, lightning-fast riffs, and over the top, EDM-style keyboard flourishes. With their ostentatious costumes and goblin hypeman, the band takes cues from hyperbolic horror-metal enthusiasts like GWAR, Finntroll, and Dethklok, while maintaining an affable, self-referential sense of humor. The group's early outings, like 2007's Goblin Island, were largely low-fidelity affairs, but by the early 2010s Nekrogoblikon were operating at a far higher technical level, and employing a rotating cast of talented players.
Since the early '90s, San Jose's Exhumed have honed their brand of gore-obsessed death metal with a tongue-in-cheek flair and an overall musical approach often reminiscent of Carcass, a band that they have frequently acknowledged as a primary influence. Diligently led by founding guitarist Matt Harvey, they have endured constant lineup changes over the years. Their brutal riffs and horrifically grotesque lyrical themes only intensified over the years, culminating in uncompromising efforts like 2003's Anatomy Is Destiny, 2011's All Guts, No Glory, and 2022's To the Dead.
Halfway through the four-year touring cycle for their eighth full-length record Gnosis, Chicago-based instrumental trio Russian Circles hit the two-decade anniversary of their formation. One might expect a band to capitalize on such a major milestone. Instead, guitarist Mike Sullivan, drummer Dave Turncrantz, and bassist/keyboardist Brian Cook spent 2024 unceremoniously touring in support of their most recent album across Australia, South America, Europe, and North America. After all, this is the work ethic that built Russian Circles into one of the biggest heavy instrumental rock bands in the world. This is a band with no hit songs. No fan consensus on their best album. Just a reputation for consistency and quality.
Candlelight concerts bring the magic of a live, multi-sensory musical experience to awe-inspiring locations like never seen before in Portland. Get your tickets now to discover the music of Metallica at The Old Church Concert Hall under the gentle glow of candlelight.
Tentative Program
Pinhead Gunpowder performs at Roseland Theater. General admission floor access is open to all ages, while reserved balcony seating is for guests 21 and over.
Senses Fail have been called any number of things across their near 25 years as a band – emo, screamo, post-hardcore, metalcore, pop punk. It’s testament to the band’s perpetual evolution as much as it is their steely endurance – a quality which frontman Buddy Nielsen has required bottomless reserves of along the ride. It’s through the songs of Senses Failthat Nielsen has forever made sense of and peace with life’s highs and lows; a journey that began in the leafy suburbs of Ridgewood, New Jersey with the iconic Gold-selling debut album Let It Enfold You, and which has since seen Senses Fail become one of rock music’s most cherished, celebrated names.
Progressive metal band Periphery brings intricate riffs, explosive grooves, and a technically powerful sound to the stage. The performance features music from a band known for songs such as “Marigold,” “Scarlet,” and “Blood Eagle,” with complex musicianship, heavy breakdowns, and high-energy modern metal.
Doors: 11:30 pm / Show: 11:55 pm
Senses Fail have been called any number of things across their near 25 years as a band - emo, screamo, post-hardcore, metalcore, pop punk. It's testament to the band's perpetual evolution as much as it is their steely endurance - a quality which frontman Buddy Nielsen has required bottomless reserves of along the ride. It's through the songs of Senses Failthat Nielsen has forever made sense of and peace with life's highs and lows; a journey that began in the leafy suburbs of Ridgewood, New Jersey with the iconic Gold-selling debut album Let It Enfold You, and which has since seen Senses Fail become one of rock music's most cherished, celebrated names.
Saturday, November 28th, 2026 7:00PM Roseland Theater All Ages General Admission Floor | 21 & Over Reserved Seating Balcony No refunds or exchanges. Tickets are non-transferable. Will Call name changes not permitted. Print at home tickets can be...
Doors: 07:30 pm / Show: 08:00 pm
Doors: 07:30 pm / Show: 08:00 pm
Hotwax brings together disco, glam, metal, punk, and hip-hop.
Doors: 11:30 pm / Show: 11:30 pm