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Nine Inch Nails

Trent Reznor / Nine Inch Nails · 1988–

OVERVIEW

Trent Reznor's project, begun in Cleveland in 1988, which took the machine textures of industrial music and used them for songs with conventional emotional structure. Reznor writes, plays and produces almost everything on record; Nine Inch Nails is a band only on stage.

Since 2010 he has worked with Atticus Ross, and the two have scored films for David Fincher and others, which fed a colder and more compositional approach back into the records.

WHY IT MATTERS

A foundational language for synthetic systems made tactile, damaged and emotionally direct.

CONTEXT

The early material sits alongside Ministry and Skinny Puppy, but the reference points are as much Bowie and Gary Numan as they are industrial. The Downward Spiral was recorded in 1993 in the house where the Tate murders took place, a fact Reznor has since discussed with some regret.

The scores, beginning with The Social Network in 2010, won an Academy Award and changed what the project sounds like: less distortion, more sustained tone and space.

START HERE

  1. 01Pretty Hate Machine (1989)Synth-pop structures under industrial surfaces. Useful for hearing how conventional the songwriting always was.
  2. 02The Downward Spiral (1994)The record the reputation rests on. Dense, sequenced as one piece, and far more textural than its reputation suggests.
  3. 03The Fragile (1999)Two hours, largely instrumental in places, and the closest the project comes to a record about arrangement.
  4. 04Ghosts I-IV (2008)Instrumental, self-released, no vocals at all. The bridge to the film work.

WHAT TO NOTICE

  1. 01Damage applied to clean sourcesMost of the abrasion is a clean synth or piano put through distortion and re-recorded. The dirt is a process, not a sound source.
  2. 02Dynamics, not volumeThe loud passages work because of how quiet the ones around them are. On the later records the quiet is most of the runtime.
  3. 03Space in the mixFrom Ghosts onward there is a lot of room left empty. That restraint is what the film scoring taught the band.

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