Vocalist, keyboardist and songwriter Tony Kakko confirmed Sonata Arctica would start recording their ninth studio album in April 2016 in several home studios in Finland, with the main recording and mixing taking place at the Studio57 in Nedervetil, Finland.

The idea I had was, that turning the knob will tilt the hour glass in one direction or another, and the other cup will slowly empty and that future will be erased.

Biblically we are expected to repent and sacrifice on The Ninth Hour...to dive right back to a more mundane reality, it's a fact that we are currently living in critical, historical times.

We need to make sacrifices and in many cases we will repent our already made choices.Kakko says musical inspiration for the album came by opening his eyes and ears and letting everything in.

[8] The album title is inspired by The Ninth Hour described in the Bible, which is the moment when people are supposed to sacrifice and remorse according to that book.

[9] In a 2019 interview, Kakko called The Ninth Hour a "stressful album" due to its recording process:[10] We had the North American tour with Nightwish in the middle of the period when I was supposed to be writing the songs, but that was something that, at the time, we could not say no to.

It has a reprise, titled "On the Faultline (Closure to an Animal)", which closes the regular edition of the album and marks keyboardist Henrik Klingenberg's first usage of an acoustic piano with the band.

[10] Kakko first introduced "Among the Shooting Stars" to the rest of the band during the Stones Grow Her Name sessions, but they rejected it.

"Rise a Night" revisits their early power metal sound and talks about a group of adventurers leaving their dying planet to find a new place for their kind, eventually arriving on Earth.

Kakko wrote it during the mixing of the album for a movie project by a friend in America and then reworked it for The Ninth Hour.

I didn't make that task easy by killing the two main characters at the end of the first one (laughs).All tracks are written by Tony Kakko, except where noted[14]Credits adapted from the band's official website:[14]