100 Best Albums
- 8 MAR 1994
- 14 Songs
- The Downward Spiral · 1994
- With Teeth · 2005
- The Downward Spiral · 1994
- Pretty Hate Machine (Remastered) · 1989
- The Fragile · 1999
- Add Violence · 2017
- With Teeth · 2005
- The Fragile · 1999
- With Teeth · 2005
- The Downward Spiral · 1994
Essential Albums
- 100 Best Albums When Trent Reznor submitted The Downward Spiral to Interscope Records co-founder Jimmy Iovine, he offered an apology. “Sorry,” Reznor remembered saying in a 2016 interview with Beats 1 host Zane Lowe. “I had to do it.” Even in a shifted mid-’90s paradigm where bands like Nirvana could become famous, Spiral felt extreme—a blast of negativity so thorough that it’s hard to imagine it making headway with any size of audience, let alone the four million or so who ended up buying it. (Reznor himself remains somewhat incredulous—a note on the band’s own website describes the album as a “celebration of self-destruction in the form of a concept record that somehow managed to become a multi-platinum worldwide hit.”) Inspired by Iggy Pop, Lou Reed, and David Bowie’s Berlin trilogy (Low in particular), Spiral pushed the industrial pop of Pretty Hate Machine and the Broken EP in unexpected directions, experimenting with torch songs (“Piggy”), disco and soul (“Closer”) and ballads of such unnerving fragility that listening to them feels voyeuristic (“Hurt”). Even tracks that found continuity with the band’s earlier music—“Big Man with a Gun”, the stuttering hardcore of “March of the Pigs”—were drastically more aggressive than anything they’d done before, flashes of mania that made the album’s quieter moments feel all the more exhausted. What emerged was a pattern of emotional whiplash: You feel like you can topple the world, shred your tormentors, vent your toxic depths. Then, suddenly, you feel nothing. That you could whistle along with half of it was perverse but strangely fitting, especially given Reznor’s S&M affectations: Here was pain that felt pretty good. The album’s sound was just as polarised. Mixing digital and analogue, sample collages with live performances, densely processed signals with naturalistic ones, Spiral was a drastic renovation to the texture and feel of conventional rock. Even now, it feels damaged, noisy, wrong—the product of both a gleaming future and an already ruined past. If the album has an essentialising moment, it’s the climax of “Closer”: mechanistic synth-funk that gives way to a warped, solitary piano, part music box, part trash. After Spiral, artists didn’t have to decide whether to be a rock band or an electronic producer—Reznor had bridged the two. “I was feeling my way around,” Reznor told Zane Lowe of the period leading up to Spiral. “What do I have to say? I didn’t live this exotic life. I grew up in a town in Pennsylvania. Kind of boring. What I did know is how I felt about myself, and my struggles to figure out who and what and why from my own perspective.” And therein lies the album’s healing irony: In facing the abyss, Reznor found his congregation.
- After Trent Reznor came storming out of the darkness with this explosive 1989 debut, industrial music would never be the same. Nine Inch Nails' mastermind moans and growls over a brilliantly messy clatter of synths, guitars, drum machines and samples, unleashing his rage and dread through the crunchy rock grind of "Head Like a Hole" and the punchy synth-pop of "Terrible Lie". He then scrapes rock bottom with haunting piano dirge "Something I Can Never Have" before seeking catharsis in the sticky, funked-up "The Only Time".
Artist Playlists
- Trent Reznor perfects industrial rock with poetic and provocative ferocity.
- These records shaped Trent Reznor's singular vision.
- Trent Reznor's downward spiral gets darker.
- A sinister soundtrack for the impending war with the machines.
Compilations
More To Hear
- The LP that bridged the gap between rock and electronic.
- Marking 30 years of Nine Inch Nails’ third album.
- Featuring NIN, Jungle, and Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever.
- A mix feat NIN, SQÜRL, Fleet Foxes, Terrace Martin & DJ Shadow.
About Nine Inch Nails
With shadowy beauty and searing intensity, Nine Inch Nails—the long-running project of multi-instrumentalist/producer/songwriter Trent Reznor—expanded the scope of mainstream music. Scrutinising humanity, relationships and society, Reznor shapes deeply internalised thoughts into accessible, exciting sound. 1989’s Pretty Hate Machine brought this introspective curiosity and synth-heavy industrial rock to a broad audience, while landmark releases The Downward Spiral and The Fragile stunned with coarse guitars and striking ferocity. Nine Inch Nails is continuously evolving—experimenting with new formats and ideas, including the turbulent 2007 concept album Year Zero, about a dystopian futuristic USA, and the textured minimalism of 2013’s Hesitation Marks. Unbounded by convention, Reznor has upended relationships with labels in order to safeguard his artistic freedom and forged creative alliances with outsider champions like David Bowie, Saul Williams and David Lynch, while longtime collaborator Atticus Ross became the only other official member of Nine Inch Nails in 2016.
- ORIGIN
- Cleveland, OH, United States
- FORMED
- 1988
- GENRE
- Alternative