Tulikoira (2005): Where Circle Turned to Metal

The Turn to Metal

Album cover — rights belong to the original label

Tulikoira ("Fire Dog") is the record where Circle's turn toward heavy metal fully arrives. Released in 2005 on Ektro Records, it's the album that split longtime fans between the hypnotic krautrock of the band's first decade and the heavier, harder-edged direction that followed — a pivot that had been building since 2002's Sunrise.

It's also the album where Circle's self-coined genre tag, NWOFHM ("New Wave of Finnish Heavy Metal"), was first printed — the band's own semi-serious label for a sound that borrowed metal's weight without fully belonging to the genre. The album's cover art leans into deliberately demonic, occult-adjacent imagery, matching the heavier turn in the music itself.

Tulikoira marks a real fork in the catalog: everything before it is closer to the motorik/kosmische end of Circle's sound, and a lot of what came after — including the doom and drone textures of 2017's Terminal — traces back to the door this record opened.

Session and Lineup

Tulikoira was recorded and mixed in June 2005, and its songs reduced the band's usual sprawl to something closer to a statement: Mika Rättö on vocals and keyboards, Janne Westerlund on guitars, Jussi Lehtisalo on bass, with Tomi Leppänen, Janne Tuomi, Tuomas Laurila, and Jani Viitanen filling out drums, percussion, tapes, and additional guitar. The NWOFHM tag wasn't a stray liner-note joke — by outside accounts it was printed in large block letters across the album's booklet centerfold, with nothing else explaining it beyond the band's own track listing, exactly the kind of deadpan gesture that later calcified into shorthand for this whole phase of the catalog.

Critical Reception

The cover leans harder into horror than anything Circle had put out before — a hostile face with the album's title carved into it, blood running from the lettering — matching one retrospective guide's description of a record where "Circle's heavy-metal influences came closer to the surface, right down to its demonic artwork." Reception split about where you'd expect for a band pivoting this hard: Tiny Mix Tapes gave it 4.5/5, praising the closer, the 24-minute "Puutiikeri," for never reading as pastiche despite its genre cosplay, while another zine review was warmer on the first two tracks — comparing them to a jam between King Crimson and Budgie — but found the third meandering. A 2007 Headspin Records reissue added two extra tracks recorded with American vocalist Bruce Duff, material that later resurfaced on 2008's Hollywood.

The Four Tracks

By outside counts, Tulikoira is Circle's nineteenth album — worth remembering given how much motorik/kosmische ground the band had already covered before this metal turn. It's also a short, four-song record: "Rautakäärme" (7:05) opens, followed by "Tulilintu" (3:50) and "Berserk" (8:03), before "Puutiikeri" closes things out at 24:13 — alone longer than the other three tracks combined. Tiny Mix Tapes' review, beyond the 4.5/5 score already noted, called it "a seamless mix of heavy psych rock and fast metal" that's "never stagnant" since "every sound serves a purpose," ranking it among the band's "most concise and focused efforts" despite that sprawling closing track.