Nine Inch Nails Enters Its Least Compromising Phase Yet
In December 2016, I opened an envelope that arrived in the mail, and a fine black dust—like magnet shavings, or gunpowder, or ground-up malice—poured out onto my countertop. It gunked my fingers, and it to this day contaminates the file drawer where I’ve kept the envelope. This was how Nine Inch Nails delivered the band’s then-new album: as something that might stain you. Three decades into making anguished, seductive industrial rock, Trent Reznor had entered his least-compromising phase yet.
Which is saying something, given that this is the guy whose lobbed the phrase into karaoke bars. His 1989 debut, , paired chintzy synth-pop symphonies with shockingly abject self-loathing, but his true breakthrough of confrontation came with 1992’s , one of the best EPs in rock history. A sorcerer of studio production, Reznor made chainsaw-like guitars somehow gleam pleasurably, screamed fang-sharp hooks, and engineered horror-movie jump scares by switching between silence and noise. One accompanying music video depicted a man putting his genitals into a meat grinder.
