0.23.1 - This isn't meant to last, this is for right now
I can't find a way to recommend them to anyone.
Perhaps I am being unfair to my friends, overly protective of them and their ability to appreciate the complexity of what Trent Reznor (and later Atticus Ross) are working to convey in their music. Perhaps I am just worried about waxing lyrical about the brilliance of The Downward Spiral only to be confronted later by asking what I could possibly see in a record which sounds like a someone shouting about how sad they are while being trapped inside an industrial press*. Perhaps I feel exposed by recommending records filled with fear and rage, nihilism and depression. I've spent years asking myself these questions and I am no closer to finding an answer. As an unswerving advocate for trying to expand people's musical horizons, to get them to appreciate new and magnificent vistas, why then do I always get to the point when I talk about Nine Inch Nails that I say "They're great, their music has been part of my life for 30 years, you wouldn't like them and shouldn't listen to them"?
Time, exposure and maturity have made it a little easier; the fury and pitch black despair of early 90's Trent Reznor has developed into a more considered, less confrontational sound, but that uncompromised howl in the early records is to me what Nine Inch Nails is. I can see finding a way to convince someone to listen to Hesitation Marks without them bouncing off it, but the body of work to my mind exists as a whole - you can't just like a piece of it, the part that doesn't scare you, the part you could put on in the background of a social event if you turned down the volume enough so that no-one was focusing on the lyrics.
I can say this. With 560+ albums under my belt so far this year, while reading for this article I was reminded of this quote by Trent Reznor.
"...most entertainment, particularly music is pretty boring. Certainly, rock is boring. A lot of what's blessed as "the cool thing" feels pretty generic and also feels, a lot of it, like a desperate plea for commercial airplay and success."
I've listened to a lot of music this year and while I wouldn't call most of it boring, there are definitely themes; repetitions in form and function skipped across generations; There is no modern version of Nine Inch Nails, no musical phraseology in modern musicians which does what they do, evokes what they call to mind. Without doubt Nine Inch Nails music is challenging, dense, unconventional, deliberately obtuse or atonal or grating at times. I'm going to take this time to convince you to try and find a place for it in your heart.
In 2015 we visited the Smithsonian Institute in Washington D.C. where, in their history of media display, someone had chosen Pretty Hate Machine amongst all the albums that exist to display for the walkman display. I see you, unnamed Gen X museum curator.
I still remember the first time I heard a Nine Inch Nails album. There was a guy, Chris, who was kind of an acquaintance-of-a-friend - he went to school with people I was friends with, we didn't know each other very well - and he was a nerd in a slightly different way we were; he was more of a computer games person than an RPG/Board Games person, but for reasons I'm not clear on, the one and only time I hung out at his house as a teen he put on The Downward Spiral and I was transfixed. I'd certainly heard Head Like A Hole being played in the local rock and metal club I was underage drinking in, but I'd never listened to a full Nine Inch Nails album before that. I promptly bought The Downward Spiral on cassette that weekend, and became hooked on it; a cassette copy of Pretty Hate Machine followed soon after, and a copy of interstitial EP Broken as well (more on that later).
If the curse of teenage boys is to feel unsure, disconnected, frustrated and powerless, fumbling blindly foward trying to figure out who they are and what their place in the world is, there will always be cultural forces in the world that offer answers. For me, the frustrated nihilism of the early Nine Inch Nails albums were my touchstone; unlike right wing grifters offering endless turkish delight to disaffected teens if they just betray their species and bow to authoritarian rule, Nine Inch Nails didn't make false promises; just shoved all the 'easy answers' into your face - drugs, violence, misogyny - and made you confront the reality of what they meant and how they made you feel. More than any government program, early Nine Inch Nails music made me understand both the allure of hard drugs, and made me never want to mess with them.
Intentional or not, those early albums also started the throughline of Nine Inch Nails albums directing people to resist control; to take their rage and aim it at the societal shackles which sought to hold them in place. When the chorus of your first real hit proclaims "I'd rather die than give you control", the direction of travel is set. Trent Reznor is angry at the world, desperate to push back against the pressure from society and capitalism to conform, to be commercial, to be limited and restrained, and in that he echoed my own frustration, and articulated it far better than I ever could.
Pretty Hate Machine came out in 1989, but none of the Nine Inch Nails discography sounds dated or specific to a certain era of music. Its sample-driven combination of synth, hard rock guitar, drum machines, piano and Trent's voice and delivery changing from aggressive on Head Like A Hole to pained and fragile on Something I Can Never Have to staccato beat poetry on Down In It establish that the range Nine Inch Nails are willing to operate in is bigger than the whole sky. As records go though its pretty approachable in terms of the majority of it has some kind of verse/chorus/verse structure and the sounds on it sound like they come from musical instruments.
By comparison, the title track on The Downward Spiral is a looping, descending scream for four minutes while an 11 note piano phrase is repeated underneath it, and a spoken-word poem is whispered almost inaudibly behind the screaming. A concept album about someone who destroys themselves and everyone around them as they find themselves isolated and rejected by society, it's not an easy listen, but it's an incredible artistic achievement. This album is the epitome of my problem recommending NIN, because even though it can feel impenetrable, when it all falls into place, and you appreciate what it accomplishes as a whole it is breathtaking. Despite producing incredibly popular metal club dancefloor standby Closer, its an album I can't ever listen to in sections, in individual tracks. I have to absorb the whole thing, or not at all.
While we're in this period, lets touch on Broken and The Fragile. Not including Broken in my 1000 albums bums me out, because as much as it's incredibly bleak, born of true frustration (with the music industry in this case, a tale as old as time) and is coupled with some of the most transgressive visuals ever associated with music (don't go googling around for music videos from this EP without expecting some grizzly Saw-esque stuff), it also is a condensed collection of some of my favourite NIN songs from their discography, so I listened to it anyway even though I can't count it towards my stats. This is doubly galling because the most recent NIN 'album', Bad Witch is two tracks shorter and 90 seconds shorter in run time, but is listed as a full album (more on that later).
I've already covered The Fragile so I don't want to retread old ground - suffice to say that it's exactly the kind of double album a highly depressed, highly creative drug addict heading for rock bottom might create. I think it's wonderful but its definitely not as tightly constructed as later albums.
There's a long gap after The Fragile where Nine Inch Nails functionally doesn't exist. Trent goes to rehab and comes out clean and with a new, less destructive, less nihilistic, but still bleakly realistic perspective which informs the writing on With Teeth and Year Zero. With Teeth is as close to a conventional record as NIN have ever produced, we're back to the realm of the verse/chorus/verse structure and music which sounds like it came from instruments again; the emotional spectrum is still as wide open as it ever has been, from haunting and spare to desperate and in-your-face. It also marks a continued and growing trend as Nine Inch Nails as protest music, decrying societal decay, authoritarianism and our willingness to be complicit in our own subjugation.
Those themes then became the foundation for what is, in my opinion, the best Nine Inch Nails album, Year Zero, a concept album about a corrupt American government who seize power by eroding lines between church and state, controlling the population through medication created by pharmaceutical companies, and enforced through a police state heavily invested with religious iconography. Sounds outlandish, I know, but hear me out. The entire album chronicles in song the ideas and people who exist in this future, until supernatural intervention in the form of The Presence reaches down from the sky to undo all of humanities works.
The promotion for Year Zero took the form of an 18 week long Alternative Reality Game which honestly, I could write another 10,000 words about. Well done ARGs create some of the best interactive storytelling and community experiences you can have, and the Year Zero ARG telling the history of its dark future via data packets sent back in time via experimental backup software before The Presence destroys the world paints every track on Year Zero with additional context and narrative. It's truly a multimedia experience, and I wish there were a way for everyone to experience it alongside the album. In the meantime, I will leave you with this 45 minute video by an affable frenchman which covers the broad points of the ARG.
I love Year Zero. It rules.
It's at this point that NIN release Ghosts I-IV, a kind of soundtrack for a movie that doesn't exist/set of instrumental soundscapes. It's great, eerie, ambient music. It's Extremely Not Chill Vibes To Have An Existential Crisis To. I listened to it for this but its very long and requires you to be in a certain headspace to really vibe with it, so I didn't spend the time listening to the more recent Ghosts V: Together or Ghosts VI: Locusts because I was already bummed out enough as it was.
That finally led me to the last two 'real' NIN albums, The Slip and Hesitation Marks. The Slip is a weird album; deliberately done as a kind of improvisational thing, it was recorded in very few takes basically over the course of a couple of weeks and then issued. This was in part Trent experimenting with the process now he had become his own publishing arm, having broken from the music label system and running everything himself. For an album of experimental songs without significant polish it's interesting, and there are some great individual songs on there, but it's amongst the first NIN albums which doesn't have that kind of intentionality and craft that the others do, so it doesn't hold in my heart the same special place the rest of them do.
Hesitation Marks exists as a kind of alternative reality Greatest Hits record. The album and its musical palette manage to reflect or call back to the styles of music and the soundscapes of all the previous NIN albums; allusions to Pretty Hate Machine, The Downward Spiral, The Fragile, With Teeth and Year Zero can all be found across the tracks of the album, but each of them reflecting more modern concerns; gone is the drug-addicted nihilist in his 20s raging against the world; in his place, a sober, more reflective Trent Reznor talks about the things which keep him awake at night - depersonalisation, depression, conformity, and crisis.
In case it's not been clear throughout this article, NIN are not a band you listen to if you are in need of something to lighten your mood. Regardless, I really like Hesitation Marks whenever I listen to it, but often I find myself just not thinking to; like with REM before, I gravitate to the albums I know so well because they are what I grew up with, or have lasting memories of.
The most recent NIN releases were the hardest ones for me to classify. Between 2016 and 2018, NIN released three EPs; Not The Actual Events, a kind of 5 track throwback to the era of Broken and The Downward Spiral, with tracks filled with spite and agression; Add Violence, something between the lyrical soundscapes of The Fragile, or tracks from Ghosts I-IV with added lyrics, and Bad Witch, which is what I guess a 'modern' Nine Inch Nails album sounds like - mellower in parts, experimental, Trent Reznor plays Saxaphone on it which is unusual but works really well. Conceived of as a trilogy, Bad Witch got promoted to full album status because of specifically how the modern streaming platforms promote and prioritise album releases over EPs. In the end, my feeling is that these three EPs are in reality a single NIN album, released in segments across a two year time period, and I've classified it as such in my records. It still chafes that Broken, a longer EP than Bad Witch is an album would not qualify because of a technicality, but I enjoyed listening to it anyway.
I don't think I'll ever be able to convince someone to dedicate the time and energy to even find out whether they might be a Nine Inch Nails fan. Maybe it's too dark, too depressing, too atonal or shouty or grinding for a palette grown up on the smooth edges of modern pop and rock. Nine Inch Nails are unapologetic in their creativity, defiant in their honesty, devastated in their pessimism about the world around them.
But the one thing they are not, could never be, have never been, is boring.
*Paraphrasing my father's review of The Downward Spiral when he came into my room while I was listening to it.
