Circle Terminal (2017): The Southern Lord Records Breakthrough

Circle Terminal: Going Global via Southern Lord Records

Album cover — rights belong to the original label

Circle Terminal, the band's 2017 studio album, came out on June 23, 2017 on Southern Lord Records — the influential American label co-founded by Sunn O))) guitarist Greg Anderson — and the signing itself says something about how far Circle's reach had grown by this point in the catalog. Where the band's early labels (Bad Vugum, Metamorphos) were small Finnish outlets, Southern Lord put Terminal in front of an international heavy-music audience the band hadn't reached before. Bandleader Jussi Lehtisalo was characteristically confident about what the deal meant, telling Bandcamp Daily: "Through Southern Lord Records, Circle will finally make their worldwide breakthrough and get massive amounts of new audiences."

Musically, despite Circle Terminal landing on a doom/sludge label, reviewers didn't actually hear doom — Southern Lord's own catalog copy sold the record to its extreme-music audience as "a searing platter of krautrock with scorching doses of The Stooges & Judas Priest" from "this legendary Finnish horde," leaning into Circle's strangeness rather than smoothing it over for a metal crowd. It's another data point in the band's habit of picking up a genre fully rather than sampling it — the same instinct behind Hollywood's classic-rock costume a decade earlier, pointed at a different tradition entirely.

Terminal is also a reminder that Circle's story doesn't stop at any one "classic era" — the band was still finding new heavy-music scenes to plug into more than 25 years after forming, and would go on to release Muurahaiset in 2024.

Recorded in Helsinki, Mixed on an Island Fortress

Terminal was tracked at ARTLAB studio in Helsinki and a location logged simply as "Cabin," then mixed at HAISTA II studio out on Suomenlinna — the historic island fortress in Helsinki's harbor — with all of it done in 2016 ahead of the release. The six credited musicians were bandleader Jussi Lehtisalo on bass, Mika Rättö on vocals and keyboards, Tomi Leppänen on drums, and Janne Westerlund alongside Julius and Pekka Jääskeläinen on guitars. The album runs six tracks and roughly 40 minutes, front-loaded by the sprawling, nearly 13-minute opener "Rakkautta Al Dente," followed by the title track, "Saxo," "Imperiumi," "Kill City," and closer "Sick Child." Southern Lord issued it on green and pink vinyl (with a later clear-vinyl pressing) as well as CD, with the original vinyl run limited to 500 copies.

A Genuine Critical Hit

Terminal became one of Circle's best-reviewed records internationally: Metacritic aggregated a Metascore of 87 from five critic reviews, with none mixed or negative. The Quietus scored it 90/100, singling out the title track as "a glorious retooling of 'I Wanna Be Your Dog' as a 21st-century motorik classic" and calling the album overall "an unquestionably essential release" of 2017. New Noise Magazine handed it a full five-star rating, describing the band as sounding like "The Stooges going through a wormhole of psychedelic ambiance," while Metal Hammer filed it under "space metal," pitching it as "Judas Priest meets Queen meets Can." Notably, the doom specialist outlet The Sleeping Shaman also gave it a glowing writeup, praising the "regimented musicianship beneath [the band's] loose, groovy surface" and drawing comparisons to Deep Purple and Spiritualized rather than to any doom peer.