do you fucking know who you are?
PRETTY HATE
MACHINE
Written, arranged, and performed by Trent Reznor, NIN's first album Pretty Hate Machine arrived in 1989. The songs on Pretty Hate Machine feature catchy melodies set against dark, introspective lyrics; Reznor proclaimed this combination "a sincere statement" of "what was in [his] head at the time". MTV aired videos for "Down in It" and "Head Like a Hole", but an explicit video for "Sin" was not released until 1997 on Closure (in edited form). Spending two years on the album charts, Pretty Hate Machine became one of the first independently released records to go platinum.
While recording the earliest NIN tracks, Reznor was unable to find a band that could articulate his songs as he wanted and instead decided to play all the instruments himself. For the band's studio recordings, this role largely remains Reznor's, though he has since involved other musicians and assistants. Nine Inch Nails first toured North America opening for industrial band Skinny Puppy as well as alternative rock acts such as Peter Murphy and The Jesus and Mary Chain. Reznor soon received a reputation for smashing instruments on stage out of frustration. This aggressive attitude won over NIN's earliest audiences, who were often openly confrontational towards synthesizer-based bands.NIN then supported Pretty Hate Machine with a world tour that continued through the first Lollapalooza festival in 1991, where the band "stole the show" from headliners Jane's Addiction despite numerous equipment problems. After receiving a disastrous European reception opening for Guns N' Roses, NIN returned to America amidst pressure from TVT to produce a more commercial follow-up to Pretty Hate Machine. In response, Reznor secretly began recording Broken under assumed names to avoid record company interference.
BROKEN
Broken was released in 1992 and took the form of an EP of six songs plus two bonus tracks. In the liner notes, Reznor credits his band from the 1991 tour as an influence on the guitar-based sound of Broken, a sound that he described as "a blast of destruction".
Peter Christopherson of Coil directed a performance video for "Wish", but the most infamous video made for the album was "Happiness in Slavery". The latter video was almost universally banned for its graphic depiction of performance artist Bob Flanagan stripping naked and lying on a machine that subsequently pleasures, tortures and then kills him. A third video, "Pinion", aired twice on MTV before once again being banned for objectionable content (although images from it did become a fixture in the opening title sequence of the MTV show Alternative Nation). Combining these videos with other shocking footage for "Help Me I Am in Hell" and "Gave Up", Christopherson and Reznor created a longform music video informally called The Broken Movie, which depicts the murder of a young man who is kidnapped and tortured while forced to watch Nine Inch Nails music videos. This mini-film has not been officially released, but is available online.
An alternate studio performance video for "Gave Up", featuring Richard Patrick and Marilyn Manson, was filmed at Le Pig studios (site of the Charles Manson murders). A 1995 live performance of "Wish" was also filmed, and both videos were included on the Closure compilation in 1997. Broken was followed by the remix EP Fixed in late 1992.
THE
DOWNWARD
SPIRAL
NIN released its second full album in 1994, The Downward Spiral, which debuted on the Billboard 200 at number two. The Downward Spiral eventually became the highest-selling NIN release in the USA. Most of The Downward Spiral was mix engineered by Alan Moulder, who would take on more extensive production duties for subsequent NIN albums. The album spawned two commercial singles ("March of the Pigs" and "Closer") and two additional tracks ("Hurt" and "Piggy") that were issued to radio without a commercial single release. The "Closer" video directed by Mark Romanek set a standard for NIN videos with its images of a pig's head, dead meat, a topless woman, and BDSM paraphernalia. MTV made significant edits to the video for objectionable content, but broadcast the edited version frequently. A censored radio edit that partially mutes the song's explicit lyrics received extensive radio airtime. "Hurt" enjoyed renewed success when it was covered by Johnny Cash in 2002 to great acclaim. Reznor has stated that hearing Cash's cover revitalized his interest in writing music and partly inspired the stripped-down approach to songwriting for With Teeth.
David Bowie sang a duet of "Hurt" with Reznor on the Dissonance concert tour in 1995. This and other performances from NIN's marathon Self Destruct tour were documented on Closure.
After The Downward Spiral, Reznor produced a remix album entitled Further Down the Spiral, the only non-major NIN release to be certified gold in the US. It featured contributions from electronic music pioneer Aphex Twin and Jane's Addiction guitarist Dave Navarro. There are two versions of Further Down the Spiral, both featuring exclusive content. A tenth anniversary reissue of The Downward Spiral was released on November 23, 2004 as a two disc "Deluxe Edition" package. The first disc, a hybrid SACD, featured the entire album in high definition 5.1 surround sound and a remastered version of the original CD stereo mix. The second disc featured album b-sides, previously unavailable demos, and other non-album tracks in remastered stereo sound.
Widely regarded as NIN's most influential album, The Downward Spiral marked a high point for the band, which reached its widest ever mainstream audience with a mud-drenched performance at Woodstock '94, broadcast on Pay-Per-View and seen in as many as 24 million homes. Many other artists began citing Reznor as an influence after the release of The Downward Spiral, and Nine Inch Nails received considerable mainstream success in the mid-1990s, affording the venues for an expanded live show with arena rock production values, thereby adding highly theatrical visual elements to an already overwhelming live show. At the same time, Reznor's relentless studio perfectionism, struggles with addiction and bouts of writer's block began to elongate the time between major NIN releases. This served to increase fan anticipation for the band's next move during the wait between releases. Reznor's appearance in Time magazine on the list of 1997's twenty-five most influential people solidified his status as "the most vital artist in music"; however, the end of NIN's first decade was characterized by a very long tour in support of The Downward Spiral followed by an even-longer period of relative silence.
THE
FRAGILE
Fans waited five years between The Downward Spiral and NIN's next major release, The Fragile, released in 1999. Dense in musical texture but lyrically sparse, the album was built around "sound-scapes", according to Reznor, in which "songwriting and arranging and production and sound design[...] became the same thing. A song would start with a drum loop or a visual and eventually a song would emerge out of it and that was the song."
In advance of the album's release, fans speculated that the song "Starfuckers, Inc." was a parody of Reznor's former friend and protégé, Marilyn Manson. According to this view, the lyrics satirized Manson as being vain and insincere. Manson and Reznor soon put aside their differences: Manson co-directed and appeared in the music video and performed the song alongside NIN at Madison Square Garden in 2000.
The Fragile debuted on top of the Billboard 200, selling 228,000 copies in one week and receiving generally favorable reviews. Without sufficient promotion from Interscope Records, however, it slipped out of the charts soon afterwards, and Reznor was forced to pay for the subsequent North American tour out of his own pocket. Spin hailed it as the "album of the year" and several songs from The Fragile were regular features on alternative rock radio stations.
Reznor followed The Fragile with another remix album, Things Falling Apart. This was released soon after the 2000 Fragility tour, itself recorded and released on CD, DVD and VHS in 2002 as And All that Could Have Been. A deluxe edition of the live CD came with a companion disc entitled Still, featuring stripped-down re-interpretations of songs from the band's entire career along with several new pieces of music. Some of Still originated in Reznor's unreleased score for Mark Romanek's film One Hour Photo, and three videos for it were released on the official NIN website.
WITH
TEETH
NIN's fourth album, released in 2005, was written and recorded following Reznor's battle with alcoholism and substance abuse: the lyrics of With Teeth reflect this struggle. While most critics hailed the album as a "return to form" after The Fragile, some criticized With Teeth for being trite and unoriginal. With Teeth, which leaked prior to its official release date of 3 May 2005, contains guest appearances by Dave Grohl on drums and live percussion. Just as The Fragile had, the album debuted at the top of the Billboard 200. A music video for the first single, "The Hand that Feeds", premiered on the official NIN website rather than on a traditional music video channel. Though the package for the album lacks typical liner notes, the album website features access to a digital PDF poster full of stylized artwork and lyrics. The entire album was made available in streaming audio on the band's official MySpace page in advance of its release date.
In April of 2005, Trent Reznor released the source files for "The Hand that Feeds" in GarageBand format, allowing his fans to remix it. This release spawned an unofficial remix contest, in which over 500 fan remixes were submitted. In response to this successful experiment, Reznor released the source files for the album's second single, "Only" in a wider range of formats.
David Fincher directed a video for "Only" using primarily computer-generated imagery; it debuted July 11, 2005 on Fuse. The third single from With Teeth, "Every Day Is Exactly the Same", was released in April 2006. Though a planned music video was reportedly scrapped in the post-production stage, "Every Day Is Exactly the Same" still topped Billboard's 2006 year-end Hot Dance Singles Sales and Hot Digital Songs charts.
In the months following the release of With Teeth, two new songs surfaced: "Non-Entity" (first performed by Reznor solo at the ReactNow! Hurricane Katrina benefit concert) and "Not So Pretty Now", both of which have appeared on set lists of the With Teeth tour. During a chat with fans on the official NIN fan club, The Spiral, Reznor stated that these songs were outtakes from the With Teeth sessions, and studio recordings of them may surface. A live recording of "Non-Entity" appears on Beside You in Time.
YEAR
ZERO
The upcoming Nine Inch Nails studio album is entitled Year Zero and will be released on April 17, 2007. The first single, entitled "Survivalism", was due for radio airplay on March 6, 2007, but received an early premiere along with other songs from the album on the NIN MySpace page. The song was later released in GarageBand format for remixing.
A viral marketing campaign has emerged to promote the album's concept. Clues from tour t-shirts have led fans to discover websites that describe an "Orwellian picture of the United States circa the year 2022," and a telephone number that returns a clip of "Survivalism". In addition, the Year Zero song "My Violent Heart" was reportedly found on a thumb drive in the bathroom stall at a NIN show in Lisbon, Portugal (as were other new tracks "Me, I'm Not" and "In This Twilight" at other European concert venues) ahead of their debut on MySpace. This suggests that the band itself covertly distributed the new music. Fan participation in this alternate reality game has caught the attention of the media; MTV News, USA Today, and Rolling Stone have cited fan-site The NIN Hotline, forum Echoing the Sound, fan club The Spiral, and NinWiki as sources for new discoveries.