Interview: Russian Circles’s Brian Cook on Nine

August 27, 2026

Praise be man.

On the eve of the release of Russian Circle‘s latest album Nine, I count myself a lucky person to share with you an interview with the band’s bassist Brian Cook. Brian was both kind and generous enough to answer my questions about the new album, the band’s career, and other aspects of the world of Russian Circles I’ve always wanted to know.

Iron Goddess of Mercy: It’s been 4 years since 2022’s Gnosis and 20 years since the band’s debut Enter. For a remarkably consistent and consistently remarkable band, what feels different since Gnosis? Since Enter?

Brian Cook: Well, I’d say 80 to 90% of the material on the albums up through Blood Year stemmed from ideas Mike and Dave worked out as a duo. I didn’t join the band until the second album, Station, but my understanding of the Enter writing process was that it was your typical situation of friends meeting up in a rehearsal space and jamming on a handful of ideas until songs started taking form. During my tenure in the band, I’ve bounced back and forth between living in Seattle and Brooklyn, so my role usually involves waiting for demos from the Chicago contingent and then filling things out and gluing the pieces together. That said, there are songs on our albums that were total group projects as well as songs that were either written entirely by Mike or myself, but usually the material came together by Mike and Dave hammering things out in the rehearsal room.

Things got kinda tricky on Blood Year because Mike moved to LA, so there were fewer opportunities for those guys to practice together. Then the pandemic forced us to update our writing strategy because we either rode out the lockdown without working on new material or we figured out a way to step into the 21st century with recording at home and swapping music files. So starting with Gnosis, our material began to take shape with most of the workshopping of ideas taking place at home rather than in the practice space. Mike and I would submit full songs to the band instead of pitching a few parts at a time. Songs would still change and evolve as other members added their contributions, but there tended to be a clearer vision from the get-go with each new song. With Nine, we took the lessons we learned from Gnosis as far as home recording and submitting larger and more thought-out compositions, but Mike and Dave could also go back to working things out together in the rehearsal space, so it was the best of both worlds. We could really get into the details by working independently at home on our DAWs, but we could also get that crucial factor of working face-to-face in real time.

IGoM. How do you see Nine fitting in with your broader discography? What felt new during the writing and recording process? What felt like refinement of the band’s various hallmarks? As a kind of corollary, what art (music, film, visual, literary, etc. etc. etc.) influenced the approach to Nine?

BC: Even after all of these years, I think we’re still learning how to be a band. There is no set way of doing things. Mike and I even had a few conversations about writing roles while making Nine. Specifically, I didn’t want Mike to feel like he carried the burden of all the songwriting, but I also didn’t want him to feel like I was stepping on his toes by pitching a bunch of songs. And even beyond that, I think we sometimes have different ideas as far as how to treat each other’s songs. Like, Mike tends to keep his contributions pretty minimal when I turn in a song, whereas I tend to write busier material on the stuff he sends me. I’m like, “Mike did his 33% of the work, now I gotta do my 33%,” while he’s like, “oh, Brian wrote a song… I’m gonna take a step back and let him shine on this one.” When you’re not hammering this stuff out in a room together, sometimes you just need to take a moment to ring your bandmate up and say, “hey, what are we aiming for here?” And honestly, that’s kind of a new conversation for us. But I think Mike had a clearer idea of what he wanted out of this record, so I reigned in some of my impulses and inclinations and let him take the wheel. To answer your question, I think Nine is a bit more like the earlier records in our discography as far as the vision being more based around Mike and Dave’s work as a unit, though it benefits from the heavier scrutiny and workshopping we adopted on Gnosis.

As far as influences on the approach to Nine, that’s a tricky one to answer because… well… we’re not twentysomethings anymore. We don’t live together in the same apartment like Mike and Dave did back in the early ’00s. We don’t meet up twice a week to practice and we’re not going to shows with each other on the weekends. We live in different states and we have our own independent lives, so I’m never entirely sure what the crossover of our active interests looks like, and I don’t think any of us would ever share a record or a movie or a book and say, “hey guys, I wanna do something JUST like this.” I’m not gonna try to pretend that we live in some sort of cultural vacuum or anything like that, but I think we like the illusion of conjuring ideas from the ether, ya know? Trusting the subconscious. That said, the Snow Sculpture for Chicago on the cover of the album has long fascinated the band, and I think there’s a parallel between our work and Tony Tasset’s rendering of something cold and ugly in a careful, meticulous, and ultimately moving way. That’s probably the one piece of art that we talked about during the writing process that was a shared reference point.

IGoM. Nine, which is a grand achievement, feels like the band’s heaviest album to date, particularly the two singles “Borehole” and “Empath” and the pit-clearing closer “Seventh Seal.” I also said that about Gnosis in 2022 and Blood Year in 2019. While the beautiful, wistful, introspective, hopeful, and dare I say uplifting “Bloom” capped Gnosis—a kind of horizon-looking ballast to an all-timer in the dazzling and emotionally explosive “Betrayal”—we don’t get that on Nine. What led the band to end on a track like “Seventh Seal” as the album’s final word?

BC: Well, that’s very kind of you. I really do appreciate the close listening of our albums. We initially discussed ending Nine with Mike’s classical guitar piece “Arletta” as a kind of comedown to what ultimately felt like a pretty dark and heavy album. But we made a last minute decision during mastering to swap the order with “Seventh Seal” so that the album ended with a Cliff Burton-era Metallica approach of using classical guitar as a Trojan horse for a big, dumb riff fest.

A friend of mine made a joke about how he misses the older songs that sounded like soundtracks to winning the Stanley Cup. I think “Bloom” touched on that vibe, but “Bloom” is also, in my mind, the closing of a certain chapter of our sound. I actually flew down to LA in January 2020 to work on that song with Mike, and I remember really struggling to find a way to treat the song without it feeling too much like a post-rock song from the 2010s. Then the Pandemic hit and we shifted gears and made a deliberate move to write a heavy, gnarly record. “Bloom” felt like a weird outlier by the time we made the record, but in my mind it also felt like a memory of the pre-Pandemic world. It might have made more sense to have it as the first song on Gnosis—to start the album with something sublime before the interruption of the ominous and oppressive stuff. But I think leading with the catharsis of the heavy material was the stronger statement, and placing “Bloom” at the end served as a kind of memory or recollection from the past—a reminder of what we lost and a sort of eulogy to a different era, both culturally and within the band.

“Seventh Seal” is definitely a polar opposite of a closing statement. It’s all brute force. Maybe it’s not even a statement at all… maybe it’s more of a punctuation mark. The final nail in the coffin.

IGoM; There have been some really cool instrumental albums (Carceral’s Descending Reprisal, Daydream Plus’s Second Last Day of Summer) recently released that are not from your “typical” instrumental genres. For a band that has been an instrumental one for over 20 years now, how does the band approach voice? Approaching having something to say without the literal words to say it?

BC: I rarely think about the instrumental aspect of our band. With nearly every band I’ve ever played in, vocals were the final piece in the puzzle. The songs are written around instrumental ideas, not vocal melodies. So whether I was playing bass in Botch or These Arms Are Snakes or SUMAC, the songs had to function first and foremost as instrumental pieces, and then the vocals provide additional context and ornamentation. With Russian Circles, we’re just skipping that last step and leaving things to the listener’s imagination. If anything, I think the ambiguity that happens when there isn’t a lyrical component really opens things up. It provides more opportunities to explore different timbres and textures and styles. It makes people focus on the instrumentation and allows each member to have a stronger and more prominent “voice.”

IGoM: As a follow-up, who do you hear most clearly on particular tracks from Nine? There are songs where your bass seems to be leading the show; where Dave’s drumming has a lot to say; and of course where Mike’s looping guitars are speaking. In your writing process, are you conscious of a song belonging to a particular member and what they might be trying to say?

BC: This maybe speaks to what I was saying earlier about not stepping on anyone’s toes and having clear conversations about carving out space for each other. We’re an instrumental trio, so every component is important. There was definitely a point in my younger years where I felt like I had to be Geddy Lee and I needed to write really complex parts and pad everything with layers of synth. But now the challenge is to keep things simple and effective—to serve the song.

There’s a bit of a tightrope walk as far as finding a good balance between leaving room for others to shine versus making the song compelling with additional layers and depth. It can be tricky. On “Meridian,” I was encouraged to push things into simpler and simpler territories during the middle section of the song, until we finally tracked it in the studio and were faced with this long stretch that just felt flat and static. We wound up reverting to one of the initial ideas I pitched. So there’s a lot of trial and error in figuring out what works best. But we often find that you have to try out a bunch of wrong ideas to ensure your first idea was the right one.

But even simplifying things can be tricky. There were times during the writing process where the guys would say, “maybe you should just do the root note here” but even just playing the root note involves a whole world of possibilities. Do I play the root note in a syncopated pattern in time with the kick drum? Or do I just let it ring out with the guitar? Should there be distortion on the note? A filter of some kind? And then there were times where there would be a debate about what the root note even was. Mike would play a dissonant chord, and he’d say, “The lowest note in this chord is B, so play B.” But it wouldn’t sound right. Like, you can play a C major chord on guitar and add the G below it… but it’s still a C major. It would be so much easier if we were in a country band where you could use the Nashville number system. But instead we’re out here making a racket and debating whether it’s a good racket or a bad racket. Haha!

But again, this level of attention to detail is a new thing for us. We weren’t hearing the early full-band arrangements in a loud rehearsal room; we were hearing it in headphones on Logic. So you can really get option paralysis or hyper-fixated on minutiae very easily. It’s helpful to have bandmates weigh in and tell you to chill the fuck out.

IGoM: Notably, most Russian Circles albums have song titles that refer directly to places and cities across the globe. Here, we have “Meridian,” the most globally encompassing ‘place’ yet cited. What has geography, the globe, Earth, cities, and/or emplacement meant to the band over its career and what does it still mean?

BC: I’m pretty fascinated with geography, maps, remote locations, and stuff like that. And I’m always interested in how location factors into creators’ work. Our album Geneva, for example, was written at a property Dave was caretaking up in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. It was a very bucolic, peaceful place, so perhaps that’s why Geneva feels like the most peaceful album in our catalog. “Lisboa” off of Guidance was written by Mike while we were on tour in Portugal. “Cheyenne” off of Memorial references a harrowing, icy drive we did on a winter tour through Wyoming. Those kinds of references are all over our catalog. We’ve been fortunate to have a strong international following from pretty early on in our career, and that’s enabled us to travel all over the world. It would be such a wasted opportunity to see so much of the planet and not take some sort of inspiration from the experience or pay homage to it in some capacity.

IGoM: There are so many songs, riffs, moments in Russian Circles’ illustrious career that make me say to my friends, “I wish I wrote that,” or “I wish I thought of that.” Something as seemingly simple (but so fundamental to the band) as the two little cymbal taps before things erupt in “Carpe” or something as huge as the entirety of Guidance. What Russian Circles moments, riffs, or songs still awe you? What are some other songs or riffs or moments from your favourite bands or artists that make you think, “Fuck, if I had only come up with that!”?

That’s a tough one. As I mentioned earlier, there’s no set formula for how we write. Some things get labored over. Some songs come to fruition with almost no effort. I really enjoy making albums where there is still some element of mystery or new opportunity as we record the album, so that when we’re done there’s that sense of being enamored or surprised by our own work. But it’s tough to find the right balance of feeling like the material’s full potential has been reached and the feeling that the material is still fresh and the moment of genesis has been captured. For me personally, I still find lots of moments on Geneva to have that “wow, I can’t believe we wrote this” element to it, largely because we elaborated on the material so much in the studio. We actually kinda fucked ourselves on that one because we layered the songs so heavily that it became difficult to replicate the songs live. It also meant that we didn’t play those songs all that often, so they have this almost unfamiliar vibe to them that makes it feel like someone else’s songs. But then there’s a record like Memorial, which was also largely composed in the studio, and I can’t help but feel like a lot of the bass parts on that album were never fully realized. So it’s tough to know when something is overworked or underbaked. As far as other artist’s “fuck I wish I’d come up with that” moments, my mind immediately goes to “Raindance” by His Hero Is Gone. I love how that first riff starts with just two notes on guitar, but when the bass and second guitar come in they play a harmony under the second note to form a chord. It’s so simple but every time that second note comes in I get goosebumps.

IGoM: Finally, and I want to thank you for your time with less of a question and more of an expression of gratitude. 2011’s Empros seems, at least to me from the outside, as a watershed moment for the band. It was your first album on Sargent House, and I believe it was in late 2011 or sometime in 2012 when the band toured with Deafheaven, which included slots at Fun Fun Fun Fest in Austin. Several friends and I drove to Austin from Athens/Atlanta, and I’ll never forget those sets. I’ll also never forget that those first four LPs were basically the soundtrack to every essay I wrote in the first few years of graduate school. All of which is to say: thank for it all. It would be impossible to believe if it weren’t so provably possible and true that, after all these years and all these albums, Nine would be such a triumph. Congratulations on it.

Oh man… thank you so much. We feel very fortunate to be able to continue doing this band. Every time we make a new record, we wonder if our crowd has moved on to other things, so we feel a deep gratitude to every one that continues to follow us on this journey. Thanks so much for taking the time to engage with us and ask thoughtful questions. It’s been a pleasure.