And so we roll into December, and come right up to date with Nine Inch Nails' body of work over the last three decades with last year's Bad Witch. This one effectively concludes an EP trilogy that began with Not The Actual Events and continued with Add Violence, with the slight twist that Bad Witch was described as an album rather than an EP. I'm sure you could probably argue the validity of that statement – at six tracks it's certainly not up there with the vast opus of The Fragile for length, and only runs a few minutes longer than its predecessor in Add Violence.

Anyway, let's not get bogged down in semantics. I expect this review will be somewhat rose-tinted as this album was released the very same day I finally got to see NIN live at the Southbank Centre as part of Robert Smith's Meltdown festival, so this album will always be associated with a very excited train ride to London and what is well up there with the best gigs I've ever seen. It was a real pleasure to see the band in such an intimate venue, with just a couple of thousand fellow attendees, and the tracks they played off this new album were a real highlight of the night.

Bad Witch kicks off in extremely energetic fashion, with the spiky guitar riffs and clap-along background beats of Sh*t Mirror proving an effective opening salvo. It sets the pace for the first two-thirds of the piece, and if anyone has a clue what Trent Reznor whispers in the middle of the song I'd be grateful if you could let me know – I've never been able to figure it out. Ahead of Ourselves remains a favourite of the band's recent output, and feels like a hark back to the band's earlier, more aggressive days with a driving techno-style beat to push it along, as well as some great percussion work.

Play The Goddamned Part, for what it lacks in lyrics, adds plenty of ambience with lots of fascinating layers, before we come to the first track that was released off the album, God Break Down The Door. This one certainly divided opinion upon its official release, with many comparing it to the latter work of David Bowie (not sure how that can be a bad thing?) and that it didn't feel like classic Nine Inch Nails. I suppose it doesn't, being far more electronic and leaning heavily on saxophone, but since when did this band ever settle for one thing and stagnate? That's exactly what has made the band so relevant over three decades when many of their counterparts – and even many that came after them – have long since faded to obscurity.

The last couple of tracks find the band in much more reflective mood, with I'm Not From This World evoking a mood and sentiment that has often existed in Reznor's music. It has a definite SF-nal feel to it, with dark atmospherics pushing us through to the finale track in Over and Out. This is a gentle, lilting sort of offering, again infused with a splash of saxophone, that takes up the last eight minutes of the album.

To expand a little on that track, both the title and the feel of this one left me wondering if I'd heard the last of Nine Inch Nails. It's certainly been all quiet on that front through 2019, so who knows? It certainly wouldn't be unusual for the band to take a good, long hiatus, and there's plenty of very exciting soundtrack to keep Messrs Reznor and Ross busy right now. But if this is it, then it's a fine, strong note that demonstrates a band even now not willing to stay still, to continue moving and to experiment with new sounds.

Then again, by the time this gets published there could be another album released – Nine Inch Nails certainly likes to keep you guessing...

I've got the unenviable task of trying to wrap up the series next, so look out for our series conclusion soon!

Our penultimate stop on the Nine Inch Nails at 30 project brings us to 2017, and the Add Violence EP. This one is a follow-up – a musical sequel, if you would – to Not The Actual Events. That in itself is an interesting concept, and something that feels a perfect fit for a band that have rarely done things the traditional way. I'd also argue that this is a project that really does lead on from and advance the concepts laid out in its predecessor. Last time around we discussed the concept that ran through NTAE of people being 'asleep' and needing to wake up and see the world as it is, and that also exists in the majority of the tracks here.

Less Than is an extremely lively opener, with an intense electronic beat accompanied with driving guitars for a wonderfully sing-along lead-in to the album. In a sense it feels slightly out of place with the other material here, harking back in particular to the With Teeth album for me. Track two, The Lovers, leans far more heavily into the electronic elements but offers something a little softer and reflective, and is a fine showcase for the gentler singing style of Trent Reznor.

One of my favourites of this album is the third track, This Isn't The Place, which follows a continued thread of moving away from heavy guitar, once again taking on a bassy, electronic feel. This is a track that personally packs quite an emotional punch, and although it's not the most complex track NIN have ever laid down, it still delivers plenty.

Not Anymore is our penultimate song, and is one that has never really stood out that much to me – there's nothing particularly wrong with it, but it doesn't feel as strong as the rest of the record and uses the theme of the piece in a slightly heavy-handed way. That's despite being one of the heaviest tracks here to boot.

The final track is one that fascinates me, and one of the songs that I most often come back to in the recent NIN catalogue. The Background World runs for nearly 12 minutes – in fact it takes up almost half the runtime of the EP – and starts with another great electronic beat, before the guitar elements begin to leak into the piece. However almost eight minutes of the track are a sort of loop, with a final riff being played out more than 50 times with increasing degrees of degradation and sound distortion as we come towards the end of the track. You could take that many ways from the artistic interpretation angle, but it still remains a fresh listen somehow, and I can never bring myself to stop the song before the full runtime is achieved. I don't know if catchiness alone can achieve that, so it is a closing salvo to this EP that gives me plenty of pause for thought.

Add Violence feels like another very exploratory piece from NIN, and certain is a suitable second part to the EP trilogy in terms of sound and themes. Personally I prefer this one to Not The Actual Events – there are just more standout songs here, with the great first shot across the bow of Less Than, the downbeat electronic of This Isn't The Place and the strange but hypnotic construction of The Background World.

Next time around will bring us right up to date with a look at the 2018 EP Bad Witch, before we take a look back at the project and the whole output of NIN in our conclusion...

After their popular return with Hesitation Marks, it would be another few years before we saw anything further from Nine Inch Nails – for a band whose discography is littered with fairly lengthy gaps, this three year hiatus was nothing unusual. And of course that’s certainly not to say that Trent Reznor was on a hiatus either, providing soundtracks for Gone Girl and Before The Flood in the intervening years. But anything new from NIN is always an exciting time for fans such as myself, so when rumours of a new EP emerging – the first of an EP trilogy, no less – I was nothing short of giddy.

Not The Actual Events is the opener in a trio of recent Nails that will take us home for our year-long retrospective. NTAE starts a thread of the world not quite being what it seems – the listener being somebody asleep and waiting, needing to be awoken – that would continue on to Add Violence. In fact, you could argue that concept goes further back to Right Where it Belongs from the With Teeth record. And as such what you have here has a certainly dreamlike – and at times nightmarish – quality.

Branches/Bones kicks off on a sparky and energetic note, and follows a trend of recent NIN albums using Track 1 as a small taster rather than launching in with anything too substantial. It runs under two minutes, and offers up some pretty discordant guitars blended with softer sections to good effect.

Dear World is a different creature entirely, launching into a more electronic sound akin to what we found on the previous album in Hesitation Marks. It’s certainly atmospheric, and Reznor’s quiet vocals lean into that sense very nicely. I can’t quite make all the lyrics out, but that seems fitting somehow for this particular track.

She’s Gone Away is one of my favourite tracks, apparently written specifically for Twin Peaks at the request of David Lynch – and boy does it sound like it was created with that in mind. The band performed the song on an episode of the series too, and that’s well worth checking out as a video on Youtube. This is grim, moody and pared down – one of my preferred tracks from NIN’s recent output, and the one I find myself coming back to most from NTAE.

The closing salvo of the album is significantly heavier, with the rumbling bass of The Idea of You pitched against a heavier chorus and producing an enlivening effect. Then we come to another fave from this piece, our finale, Burning Bright. I have no idea what the guitar is tuned down to, or what effect has been pulled on it, but from the opening this one is just brutally low and rumbles along wonderfully to conclude the EP.

It’s fair to say that this one is different again from its predecessor in Hesitation Marks, and won a lot of praise for moving back towards elements of the band’s sound in the 1990s and 2000s. With that said, for those similarities, it also bring something more to the mix in terms of reflection and atmosphere, as well as hanging together thematically with its questions of reality and fantasy. It’s a thoughtful album put together by what these days feels like a more thoughtful performer. And while it might not please all those fans who’ve been following NIN for a long time, it’s distinctly got their sound and their feel to it – or maybe it’s more a matter of the mood it captures?

Next time around we’ll be coming to part 2 of the trilogy, Add Violence, before wrapping things up with the final piece of the trifecta in Bad Witch.

The thought of a world without Nine Inch Nails seems a strange one, but after the release of The Slip in 2008 Reznor hinted many times that it might be the end for NIN. Our last couple of reviews have looked at the How To Destroy Angels side project, and on top of that there was some excellent soundtrack work on The Social Network (which landed an Oscar, lest we forget) and The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. Around this time it seemed as though these things could form a distinctive new career direction, and it was only around 2012 – four years on from The Slip – that there were the first indications of new Nine Inch Nails material. A year later, Hesitation Marks emerged and saw the band back in the limelight again.

Hesitation Marks is a run of albums that continue to explore different sounds for NIN, and while this sort of continued transformation may not be for everyone, it seems only natural as a reflection of an artist constantly experimenting and trying new things. It keeps the core of Nine Inch Nails no doubt, and has a largely electronic sound probably most akin to Year Zero, although less furious and aggressive than that one. We begin with a very lively double header of Copy of A and Came Back Haunted (which also has a superbly weird David Lynch music video to go along with it) before some quieter, more introspective tracks in the likes of Find My Way and All Time Low. For me personally, the middle section of the album is weaker than its opening, and certainly not as good as the finale. For me everything from the ninth track on the album, Various Methods of Escape, really hits the mark and has an absolute feeling of Reznor at his best. It's layered, complex, energetic and reflective – if I could pick an absolute favourite from this album it would have to be I Would For You, which starts steadily but builds to a brilliant crescendo. There's a great singalong value to many of the album's livelier tracks, and it feels like a definite reflection of Reznor as a musician at this point. Gone is the unbridled fury that made Broken, or the deep angst of The Downward Spiral and The Fragile, replaced with a much more melancholic, thoughtful outlook. The experience of the last five years is absolutely felt in this album, and it's a welcome addition.

Hesitation Marks was at large a critical hit, and was also a high entry on the US Billboard 100 – its number three position making it the band's fifth top-five album – as well as hitting number 2 on the album chart here in the UK. It was also a Grammy nomination for Best Alternative Album, so you could argue that even in a fallow half a decade Nine Inch Nails had barely missed a step. I often wonder how it felt to put this one out after such a long hiatus, and with such a different sound to boot – then again, Reznor has never been shy to buck trends and do things his own way, so in many regards you could say this album was a natural progression.

In terms of continued NIN output, we’ll next be turning our attention to the recent ‘trilogy’ of Not The Actual Events, Add Violence and Bad Witch, which should bring us about up to date….

With plenty of soundtrack work to be going on with, it'd be another few years until we saw anything new from NIN, and we'll come to Not The Actual Events next time around..

Review by Alex Davis

Yes, I know the series is called Nine Inch Nails at 30, but as Trent Reznor's career has developed and grown we've seen numerous new directions for him as a musician. Back in 1989, who would have thought the mastermind behind Pretty Hate Machine or the furious stylings of Broken could have in time become an Oscar-winning soundtrack artist? While so many people hark back to those first four or five NIN albums, the Reznor we know today may well be a far more complete musician, with significantly more range than those earlier works. I suppose you could argue that point, but there have been numerous different sounds incorporated along the course of three decades.

Which brings us to Welcome Oblivion, which is not some sort of secret Nine Inch Nails album but the first – and to date only – full album from side project How To Destroy Angels. The project itself features Reznor alongside frequent collaborator Atticus Ross, as well as his wife Mariqueen as a lead singer – and before anyone starts throwing around claims of nepotism, her voice is actually really good, capturing just the sort of ethereal quality needed for this sort of album.

I've listened to this album through a number of times, and have honestly been chewing over what to say about if for some time. I think it's genuinely a good album, although is certainly far more ambient that anything under the NIN moniker – even Still or Ghosts I-IV feel more energetic and in your face by comparison. In some regards that's what makes it so ideal for a side project – it is different, and noticeably so. It's a record I can certainly put on, and perfectly happily have on, but it has significantly more the feeling of background music than I've encountered in anything else with the Reznor name on it. It's an album that doesn't quite fully hold my attention, but despite myself I will find I'm accidentally humming or singing along to bits I barely realise I'm hearing.

Maybe that makes it a great ambient album after all, but in reviewing it's hard to really pull apart track by track. I find that numerous songs sound similar, and sort of run together. While there's a lot here I like, there are only a few songs that jump out as a standout – Keep it Together is a solid track to lead with towards the front of the album, and Strings and Attractors is a deeply catchy number that almost veers into being poppy. And the song that first brought the band to my attention, A Drowning, is a stunningly good closer – in fact it's worth this album existing for that track alone.

While the first half is generally strong, I do also feel as though the second half lags quite badly, and there's a run of four or five tracks that don't feel at all special or memorable – I wouldn't go so far as to call them filler, but maybe a slightly different running order could have alleviated that. You could also argue that maybe it's just a little too long, and a few tracks less would maybe have worked better.
 
So yeah, it's a side project, and it's nothing like NIN ultimately. There are no doubt tracks of value here, but I don't find it as compelling as the main band. And that's not for want of trying – I've never been one to write anything off from these musical quarters, and a number of Reznor pieces have taken time to grow on me before entering firm favourite status. But no matter how much I listen to Welcome Oblivion it just doesn't seem to reach those heights. If you've always enjoyed the lighter and more ambient touches of NIN, then you might well get something out of this, but it's not industrial, it's not metal and it's not rock – it's an album that truly has its own identity. It would have been interesting to see what How To Destroy Angels might have served up next, but the members of the group have obviously been taken down other avenues since...

2008 was certainly a busy year for Nine Inch Nails – not a band renowned for churning out albums right on top of one another, they broke that formula heartily with this one coming only two months after Ghosts I-IV. They both share a similar release pattern, with their arrival being presaged only by a swift post saying '2 weeks!' on the Nine Inch Nails website. With that said, these are two very different albums, with the wordless dreamscapes of Ghosts I-IV largely replaced with a heavier sound that would be more akin to the NIN of the past.

This was an album that was recorded very quickly by all accounts – originally intended to be just an EP, this one was extended to a full album and constructed in just three weeks. In numerous interviews Reznor has described this one as an album built on instinct, angling for less polish than some previous works. While that does show, it's hard to say it's to the album's detriment – it has a great raw quality to it all the way through, and follows a fine tradition of Trent never quite pulling what you expect out of the bag.

What's interesting about this album to me at large is that it's not really what you would call industrial – the opening salvo of the record is much more rock-oriented, and the tracks are undeniably catchy and on a few listens will be whirling their way around your head for a long time. The fact this was nearly an EP also fascinates me, because the first six tracks feel like they hang together really well and could easily be one piece. The soft open of 999,999 is followed by the blast of 1,000,000 and everything for the next four tracks is driving and energetic, with Discipline being a personal standout from this run of tracks.
 
The album then drops into a far more gentle, atmospheric gear for a few tracks, taking in my favourite from the record – and possibly one of my favourite NIN tracks of all – Lights In The Sky. It's so simple and pared down, but Reznor's lyrics and delivery just add something to the sparse piano on this track. Corona Radiata is a track that is maybe a little overlong, but builds to a really satisfying finale, before the closing pair of the instrumentals of The Four of Us Are Dying and the sparky closing note of Demon Seed, the only track with a more rock/industrial angle in the closing section of The Slip.

In a career of thirty years, it's inevitable that a band and a performer will – and ideally should – change. And a part of me can understand why people hark back so much to the days of The Fragile and The Downward Spiral, but as life circumstances change so should artists change. Following The Fragile there was a run of albums that were all very different – the gentler approach of Still, the more radio-friendly flourishes of With Teeth, the electronic angles of Year Zero and the aforementioned ambient feel of Ghosts I-IV. And The Slip is as close to a proper rock album as NIN ever put out, so it's a slight tweak on the flavour of things once again.

But I feel like, whatever the approach, Trent Reznor is a performer who these days largely does what he wants creatively and whatever pleases him. If putting two free albums out in quick succession with so little fanfare isn't a marker of that, I don't know what is. As we come to look at the later years of NIN, there's absolutely a lot there well worth listening to – a comment that very much applies to The Slip also. Of all of their albums, I feel like this one has a real sing-along sort of quality, and for people new to the band it may even be one of the easiest NIN albums to access, the sort of thing you might hear in the mainstream today or in the recent past.

Suitably enough, next time around we'll be switching gears by looking a little at a piece of Reznor's work beyond NIN, so watch this space...

Year Zero is set in a world filled with religious fundamentalism, rampant nationalism and ubiquitous surveillance.  If you think this sounds familiar, then you are not the only one…

Year Zero, the fifth studio album by Nine Inch Nails, is also Trent Reznor’s most political album to date.  Written in 2006, Year Zero is based around a single concept; a dystopian vision of an America that may well become reality.

The title of the album stems from a term used to indicate regime change.  The idea behind Year Zero is that all culture within a society must be completely destroyed or discarded in order for a new revolutionary culture to replace it. All history of the nation is purged and replaced with a new government-approved version of events.

Survivalism, on the other hand, relates to the political movement of groups who actively prepare for states of emergency, including social or political disruption. The emphasis is on self-reliance, stockpiling supplies, and becoming self-sufficient.

There is an urban myth surrounding the Year Zero’s creation, in which Reznor, having completed rehab, began to take an interest in politics and the world around him, whereupon he became angry. Very angry.  With the result of that fury being Year Zero.

The truth is actually quite different, as Reznor started creating Year Zero during the With Teeth tour. However, this urban myth highlights Reznor’s growing political awareness.  In an interview with Wired magazine, Reznor stated “I'd been toying around with the idea of taking Nine Inch Nails out of being just a narrative about my own head and addressing something that had gotten higher up on the list of importance to me over the years, which has just been kind of what's happening in America and the direction we've taken as a country.”

The album of Year Zero is set in what was fifteen years in the future from when it was recorded (approximately 2020), where the world has reached breaking point – politically, spiritually and culturally.

We are presented with an America that has eroded the civil liberties of its population in the name of security, and witnessed the formation of a Bureau of Morality, a government organisation dedicated to preserving the so-called “American values”, whatever they may be.

As the chorus to Survivalism states; “I got my propaganda / I got revisionism / I got my violence in high-def ultra-realism / All a part of this great nation.”

What makes Year Zero particularly scary is its almost prophetic foretelling of a future we now find ourselves hurtling towards.  It was only in 2013, seven years after Year Zero was released, that Edward Snowden revealed the scope of America’s surveillance regime.  Anyone who had been listening to Year Zero would undoubtedly have experienced a cold shiver down their spines.

The Patriot Act in America has witnessed multiple abuses of the legislation.  Initially intended as an emergency measure, following the events of 9/11, to provide American citizens with greater security against terrorism, the Patriot Act has instead been used to invade the privacy of American citizens and to issue National Security Letters – requests to obtain private records from companies about their clients – without the previously required court order.

We are now under a constant barrage of fake news and “alternative facts”.  Even the Counselor to the President, Kellyanne Conway, defended a statement by the White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer by explaining “You're saying it's a falsehood…  Sean Spicer, our press secretary, gave alternative facts to that.”

This litany of misinformation is starkly foretold in a single line from Survivalism; “Lost our faith along the way and found ourselves believing your lies.”

Meanwhile, a similar wave of nationalism seems to be spreading through many European nations.  There has been a resurgence of far-right parties in Sweden, Hungary, Italy, Germany and France.  Now compare this with how “The cocking of the rifles / The marching of the feet” in Suvivalism evokes images of Nazi rallies in 1940’s Germany.

It is not just America that this future could apply to.  In the UK there is the Investigatory Powers Act, derided by some as “the snooper’s charter”, which allows for one of the most comprehensive government-sanctioned surveillance in any democratic country.  In an article for Computer Weekly, Megan Goulding of the human rights organisation Liberty described the Investigatory Powers Act thus: “The government’s continuing approach of subjecting all of us to suspicionless surveillance with entirely inadequate privacy safeguards is incompatible with a free, rights-respecting democracy."​

The music video to Survivalism brings this theme of rapacious surveillance and government intervention to the fore.  Presented as a series of surveillance cameras hidden in the rooms of an apartment block, recording the activities of their owners in their most private moments, the music video flits between different rooms.  As the video continues, the surveillance cameras follow a government hit-squad as it infiltrates the building and storms one of the rooms, whilst the residents ignore the commotion.

More than just a fantastic single, Survivalism – and the entirety of Year Zero – is a chilling warning of a future that we might one day find ourselves inhabiting.  One where privacy and free speech has been sacrificed in order to protect our freedom.  But, in a world where your every word is recorded and analysed, could we ever be free?

To quote the final line of Survivalism; “You got your pacifism – I got survivalism.”

Peter Ray Allison is a writer and freelance journalist, specialising in science and technology.  He regularly covers security and government policy for Computer Weekly, and endlessly worries about the number of times his internet research will have been flagged by GCHQ…

​Nine Inch Nails, at its core, has always been about anger. Not necessarily aggression – though there certainly is aggression, sometimes effusively so, and those moments are some of NIN’s finest. But anger has always been the key emotion at play throughout the bulk of NIN’s oeuvre. And in many ways it’s the anger that makes them so relatable. Because anger isn’t always a thing you do to other people; it doesn’t always move outwards, doesn’t always radiate towards. Sometimes, anger is the thing inside of you, curled up and waiting; sometimes it is the thing with claws and yes, with teeth, raking at the grey matter and gnawing on the gristle.

If Pretty Hate Machine was born of the unfocused, confused rage of a man who isn’t sure of his place in the world, then the era spanning The Downward Spiral to Still, with The Fragile as a significant waypoint, was born of an anger directed principally at the self. These are albums which tap into a sense of lonely existential crisis, a world in which everything that is wrong can be traced back to one single source: you. These are albums drenched in self-loathing, and I often suspect those who sneeringly mock the angst as dramatic and self-indulgent have never known what it is like to loathe oneself, truly loathe oneself; to feel faintly sick at your own continued existence. I was a teenage girl when I discovered Nine Inch Nails, and for the first time in my life it felt like someone had truly seen me.

The era of The Fragile produced uncomfortably honest music, shedding light on the ugliest parts so that even the faintly repulsed, aggressively confused eroticism of it rings uneasily true. A superb article at medium.com expressed this in terms that made me yell AHA! out loud: “all that jocky, cocky, screaming rage, all that raw male power that was supposed to scare or exclude us, was relatable. Teenage girls get rage; they get self-hatred. Teenage girls know what it’s like to want to cuss and scream and fuck and thrash around incoherently because you don’t have the agency to do any of those things.”

I say all of this because when With Teeth was released – the first new, full NIN album released during my years of conscious fandom (I was 13 when The Fragile was released, and not yet transitioned from punk to the heavier, darker stuff) – it felt like a completely different NIN experience. And I realise now with hindsight that this is because the ever-present anger had obtained new focus. Instead of aiming inwards, this was an album that felt angry at, directing rage towards a third party. Strange, perhaps, given that Reznor indicates that this is an album about addiction and recovery, eminently internal themes. But there’s a strong sense of a you running throughout the songs; a feeling that whoever Reznor is angry at, they are someone other. Perhaps that’s the point. Perhaps this is Reznor looking back at his past self with a kind of externalised disdain, the disbelief that such a pathetic creature could ever have existed. You, the one that was.

Opener ‘All The Love In The World’ is a fantastic song; creeping, low-level threat exploding into a gloriously poppy outro complete with jangly disco piano and inch-thick riffage. It’s a well-placed statement of intent, because if you don’t like this track, there’s a solid chance you won’t like anything else on the album either. This is Nine Inch Nails shedding the skin of their previous experimentation and just throwing together an album of fucking good rock songs. ‘You Know What You Are?’ has the furious urgency of, say, ‘March of the Pigs’, but without any of the introspection of The Downward Spiral; don’t you fucking know what you are? Reznor demands, a question to which, you sense, there can be no satisfactory answer. ‘The Collector’ is an uncomplicated slice of rock ‘n’ roll, driving riffs and insistent rhythm, and yes, it’s antithetical to just about anything NIN have set themselves up to be since their inception but I defy you to listen without nodding along just a little.

Lead single ‘The Hand That Feeds’ is our first real indication as to the true external source of Reznor’s anger, and perhaps it felt surprising to realise that angst-driven industrial metal auteur Trent Reznor was as disillusioned and dissatisfied with the politics of the then-present as so many ordinary people were. This is a flagrantly political track, a direction Reznor would push further on subsequent release Year Zero, but here exists as a taster of what was to come; NIN were ultimately dropped from performing at the 2005 MTV Music Awards due to their insistence upon a stage set lampooning second worst US President George W. Bush. The grungy riffs and wry lyricism of ‘Love Is Not Enough’ take us back down self-loathing road, but with a certain wide-eyed self-awareness this time, the benefit of hindsight: (Do you wake up and taste this/ And smash it apart / I've gone all this fucking way / To wind up back at the start). Next up is one of my favourite tracks on the album, the glorious dark pop of ‘Every Day Is Exactly The Same’, all low, reverberating piano and soaring chorus and Dave Grohl’s unmistakeable percussion, the kind of song that demonstrates that relative simplicity need not be a bad thing when the ingredients are exactly right.

Title track ‘With Teeth’ feels like a throwback of sorts, the kind of queasy rhythm and half-whispered vocals which would not feel out of place on The Downward Spiral – and you will never convince me that the chorus is not a sly nod to The Fall’s Mark E Smith (With-uh teeth-uh). ‘Only’ is a very weird track even by NIN standards, almost a rhythmic monologue imbued with deliberately robotic drums and a kind of gritted-teeth humour which seems increasingly to be masking the desire to scream. ‘I just made you up to hurt myself’, Reznor intones, a desperate mantra, as though he’s trying to convince himself and isn’t quite succeeding. ‘Getting Smaller’ takes us back to the album’s latent pop sensibilities, and comparisons to The Pixies are well founded, with frenetic Joey Santiago guitar and howling Frank Black vocals. It’s an excellent rock song, on an album full of excellent rock songs, and while I can see how this might unnerve NIN fans it’s quite bizarre to me that With Teeth took flack for its relative straightforwardness; an album doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel to be worth listening to, and for a band who have continually evolved their sound over the years it seems logical to me that at some point NIN would turn to one another and say hey, why don’t we just fucking rock out for a change?
​
‘Sunspots’ does nothing you’d expect it to; it does not build to a screamy, aggressive, crescendo, nor does it abruptly change pace. It simmers and soars, brilliantly sensual, a piece of 80’s synthpop brought bang up to date. ‘The Line Begins To Blur’ and ‘Beside You In Time’ are more experimental excursions, with the latter track an almost Floyd-esque synthetic soundscape which perhaps does not quite fit on this album, but deserves a spot nonetheless. And you may ask yourself, is it even a Nine Inch Nails album if it doesn’t end on a definitive high point? That high point is ‘Right Where It Belongs’, and by ‘high point’ I mean ‘wrenchingly emotional almost-ballad”. This is one which does build to a crescendo, albeit subtle; piano-driven and distant, Reznor’s vocals seem to draw closer as the song progresses until he is right there beside you, clear as day, and the bass rises gently, the piano repeating its gentle motif. It’s soulful and sorrowful and finally, here’s some of that patented NIN introspection we’ve been hankering after. But when the final note hits, reverberating in a major key into the ether, it’s clear that this is a very different Nine Inch Nails. This is a NIN that is done needling at its own wounds. They have left self-destruction behind, and in the space left behind there is time to think, to heal. At long last, there is time to breathe.

​Most writers will tell you they’ve been writing since they were small, and I’m no exception. I started out writing poems, which graduated into awful teenage angst poems (with the requisite soujourn into Sprawling Epic Fantasy Novel territory). I started writing short stories in 2011 but never took it seriously until 2012, when my first short story was published in ‘Shadows and Tall Trees’. Since then, I’ve been what you might call a ‘serious’ writer, although I’m yet to give up my day job (it’s part of The Dream, along with the apartment in Osaka and the functioning knee joints…)
I’m also a sometime pro wrestling journalist; my article on the Golden Lovers received a Kevin Kelly shout-out during NJPW’s G1 tournament, which I haven’t stopped talking about.
In 2018, my short story “Looking for Laika” won the British Fantasy Award for Best Short Story. I haven’t stopped talking about that, either.
I was born and raised in south east London and currently live in Essex under extreme duress. When I’m not making things up I enjoy reading, travelling, watching wrestling, playing video games, collecting tattoos, dyeing my hair strange colours and making up nicknames for my cats.

British Fantasy Award-winning author, and Shirley Jackson Award finalist Laura Mauro, a leading voice in contemporary dark fiction, delivers a remarkable debut collection of startling short fiction. Human and humane tales of beauty, strangeness, and transformation told in prose as precise and sparing as a surgeon’s knife. A major new talent!
Featuring "Looking for Laika," winner of the British Fantasy Award, and "Sun Dogs," a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award.
​
Advance Praise for Sing Your Sadness Deep
“Laura Mauro’s SING YOUR SADNESS DEEP is a beautiful foray into the strange and uncanny. She digs deep into the psyche of her characters, revelling in the mysteries that propel them through their confrontations with the liminal and the bizarre. A sublime and haunting debut.”
— Simon Strantzas, author of NOTHING IS EVERYTHING

“Laura Mauro does indeed sing her sadness deep, with assured melodies, strange resonances and beautiful harmonies. This is just her first collection—I can't wait to see what she will do next.”
 — Priya Sharma, author of ALL THE FABULOUS BEASTS 

A second-hand record shop off Greenwich Market on a bright spring day in 2005. I was 18, and my eyeliner was inch-thick, my jeans low-slung and baggy enough that I could hide small children in each leg, were I so inclined. It had become something of a routine, this; combing through the boxes of CDs in search of treasure. Not looking for anything in particular, because the magic was in the browsing, in the discovery. Picking something up, examining the jewel case (remember those?). Perusing the track listing. Taking a punt, because it might be trash, but it might be something wonderful.

“Look at this,” said I, plucking something unusual from the box. A grey cloth case, pleasantly chunky, neatly emblazoned with the austere black ‘NIN’ logo; this, I would later discover, was the deluxe edition. I was not new to Nine Inch Nails. I had discovered them a couple of years earlier, deep in the mire of my disaffected teenage years – I laugh now, but disaffected I was, deeply so, having emerged not-remotely-unscathed from a secondary school tenure marred by the kind of bullying that scars you to the bone. Naturally, I gravitated to Reznor. And it was not the anger which drew me in, although that did appeal; that raw-throated fuck you vibe, that cynical aggression which I had always envisioned I might wear like armour, in lieu of feeling, which I had had rather enough of. What set Nine Inch Nails apart for me was the vulnerability.

“Look at this,” said I, and handed it over to my then-boyfriend, who would go on to become my husband. We pored the track listing together. A double album: And All That Could Have Been, a live album showcasing Nine Inch Nails in their formidable prime, which my esteemed colleague Kit Power talked about in the previous edition of this retrospective. The second album was simply titled Still. Nine tracks, some familiar, some not. Of course, I bought it; I had a sense that I’d found something rare and wonderful (and perhaps it was not as rare as I had thought then, but – deluxe edition! What a find!).

When I say that it is the vulnerability of Nine Inch Nails which made them such an important part of my life, I am referring to those quiet moments of introspection which pop up on each release, as intrinsic to the NIN experience as the raw anger of March of the Pigs, the whispered threat that is Piggy. Pretty Hate Machine set a precedent with Something I Can Never Have, which, perhaps not coincidentally, is the opening track on Still. And I had always been drawn to those moments: the soothing ambience of A Warm Place like a gentle aural bath between the aggressive cynicism of Big Man With A Gun and the abstract rage of Eraser. Perhaps it is gauche of me to admit that I had never heard a song so painfully relatable as Hurt; a song that caught me by the throat and stared me unblinking in the eye, so unflinching in its honesty. Still is an album comprised entirely of these moments. In the hands of a lesser band, it might feel repetitive, one-note. But the magic of Nine Inch Nails is that even when painting with a limited palette, they can run the full emotional gamut.

Still’s version of Something I Can Never Have is stripped-down, pared back. It is devoid of the strange ambience of the original track. It is just Reznor, and a piano, and the occasional low rumble of a guitar in the very background. There is something spectral about it, something positively gothic; for all my fond memories of the original version, it feels as though this was the way it was supposed to be heard. All the frills and fripperies of production discarded. The raw vulnerability of Reznor’s voice, and the gentle swell of a piano.

To follow with the lilting ambience of Adrift and at Peace is quite brilliant. Too much angst piled high becomes the stuff of parody; the answer is to separate it, portion it out, let the listener breathe. Much like A Warm Place, this is like a pleasant brain massage, an audio landscape of plucked strings and piano motifs. They like to do this, Nine Inch Nails; they like to remind you that they can bring you down to rock bottom and in the very next breath lift you right back up, bring you back to some infinitely more tranquil place. The Fragile, then, is a perfect follow-on. That same warm tranquillity, placing distance between the insistent percussion and thrumming bass of its original incarnation; Reznor’s voice almost a whisper, building slowly until he is insistent, urgent, but never melancholy, not truly. Stripping away the low end in favour of tinkling piano and sparse bass creates something altogether more hopeful – if not quite optimistic.

And now for something completely different. The Becoming, retaining its repetitive, thudding drum loops but with a low-key bassline in place of the noisy, fractious sampling of the original; a little less piss and vinegar, a little more heart and soul. That seems to be the theme of Still; a more nuanced take on songs which were written and performed in a particular frame of mind, as though Reznor is looking back on his older works with a degree of objectivity, viewing them now as pieces of art as opposed to audio blood-letting.

Gone, Still seems at first to back to that same place of tranquillity as Adrift and at Peace, but with a faint sense of threat running beneath; perhaps it’s the slow, persistent bass or the hum rising and falling in the background, but this is not entirely the same serene space, and NIN are not ones to repeat themselves where a variation on a theme would work far better. Into The Day The World Went Away, then, which to my ears is a far superior version than the original, and which utilises the warm, ebbing tones of the piano to perfect effect, less an abrasive aural assault and more reflective, thoughtful, Reznor’s vocals floating in for a brief spell before we return to piano. The outro is a beautiful piece of music, a slow and gentle crescendo which peaks low, but does exactly what it needs to do, and nothing more. In this, Still is something of a masterpiece; this is an album which has whittled its songs down to their most vital form, never outstaying their welcome and delivering their message to perfection. (And maybe, some might argue, this is missing the point of NIN – an excess of emotion and spiky, lingering soundscapes are precisely what this band is founded upon.)

And All That Could Have Been is apparently an outtake from The Fragile, and it certainly sounds as though it belongs there. The layers on this track reward multiple listens; come for the soulful lament, stay for the voyage of discovery. We return to the purely instrumental with The Persistence of Loss, which takes the wispy ambience of A Warm Place and turns it into a song in its own right; a distinctly filmic quality with its gentle strings and slightly askew harmonics.

Leaving Hope, though. In the pantheon of my favourite NIN tracks, Leaving Hope is absolutely one of the top-tier gods. Reminiscent of Sigur Ros, melancholic yet oddly optimistic, the sound of a setting sun with the promise that it will someday rise again. If you think that’s wanky, give it a listen. You may well write your own narrative, because this is a song which has a story at its core, somewhere, among the piano and synthesizer (which contains samples of Reznor’s voice – you can hear him wailing in the far distance towards the end of the song). This is the perfect track with which to sign off the era of The Fragile, a line in the sand between this and the very different With Teeth. This is where Reznor’s open wounds begin to heal. It’s the kind of album that makes you feel, upon listening, as though you are listening to someone whispering their secrets – not angry, or sad, just there, in the ether.
​
“Look at this,” said I, much later on, when it was dark, and we sat in the still warmth of the spring night, talking about this and that. I put the album on – we still had CD players back then, perish the thought – and in that encroaching darkness, we listened. 

Most writers will tell you they’ve been writing since they were small, and I’m no exception. I started out writing poems, which graduated into awful teenage angst poems (with the requisite soujourn into Sprawling Epic Fantasy Novel territory). I started writing short stories in 2011 but never took it seriously until 2012, when my first short story was published in ‘Shadows and Tall Trees’. Since then, I’ve been what you might call a ‘serious’ writer, although I’m yet to give up my day job (it’s part of The Dream, along with the apartment in Osaka and the functioning knee joints…)
I’m also a sometime pro wrestling journalist; my article on the Golden Lovers received a Kevin Kelly shout-out during NJPW’s G1 tournament, which I haven’t stopped talking about.
In 2018, my short story “Looking for Laika” won the British Fantasy Award for Best Short Story. I haven’t stopped talking about that, either.
I was born and raised in south east London and currently live in Essex under extreme duress. When I’m not making things up I enjoy reading, travelling, watching wrestling, playing video games, collecting tattoos, dyeing my hair strange colours and making up nicknames for my cats.

British Fantasy Award-winning author, and Shirley Jackson Award finalist Laura Mauro, a leading voice in contemporary dark fiction, delivers a remarkable debut collection of startling short fiction. Human and humane tales of beauty, strangeness, and transformation told in prose as precise and sparing as a surgeon’s knife. A major new talent!
Featuring "Looking for Laika," winner of the British Fantasy Award, and "Sun Dogs," a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award.
​
Laura Mauro started writing short fiction in 2012 and hasn't stopped since. Born in London, England, her stories have appeared in Black Static, Interzone, Shadows & Tall Trees, The Dark, and a variety of anthologies. Her debut novella Naming the Bones was published in 2017. Her short story “Sun Dogs” was a Shirley Jackson Award finalist, and “Looking for Laika” won the 2018 British Fantasy Award in Short Fiction. She loves Finnish folklore, Japanese wrestling and Russian space-dogs. She tweets at @lauranmauro.

 
As soon as Alex spoke about doing this project, I knew this was the one I wanted to cover. For starters, And All That Could Have Been was the first DVD I remember buying.
 
You might fairly assume from that fact that this is therefore a show and a film I am intimately familiar with, and that assumption would be reasonable, but incorrect. See, when I bought the DVD, I didn’t yet own a player. So I will only have been able to watch it as a guest at the houses of others; most obviously, my fathers, and Nine Inch Nails are just not his cup of tea. Plus, let’s be honest; as a young man, sitting down to watch a Nine Inch Nails DVD with the old man would feel a bit… well, pointless, I guess.
 
So I haven’t absorbed it in the same way as my VHS purchases of that era (Skid Row ‘Roadkill’, anyone?). But that strange combination of fandom and distance (the financial commitment of buying a new DVD back then being substantial) pretty well summed up my relationship with NiN at that point.
 
For example, I saw Nine Inch Nails live in their first ever UK appearance - opening for Guns N Roses at Wembley Stadium in 1991. And yes, of course, I was there for GnR, and to a lesser-but-still-significant degree Skid Row. Still, I have a vivid memory of walking into the stadium as they played, the enormous screens showing this dark haired man in shades and black, arms crossed over the top of the mic stand as he sang. It was my first big-rock-show band, and without knowing anything about him, Reznor struck me as impossibly cool, and instantly iconic.
 
I then proceeded to give him and his band no more thought for three years.
 
Then, in 1994, my father returned from a holiday to the US with a copy of what he claimed was the number 1 album in the US that week (though wiki tells me it peaked at number 2). And so it was that I was almost certainly the first kid in North Devon to own a copy of The Downward Spiral on cassette. As far as I can recall, neither of us connected the album with the band we’d seen in ‘91.
 
And I’d love to tell you that it instantly clicked with me; that I recognised it’s genius, that it opened me up to whole new vistas of musical possibilities. But I didn’t. I thought it was… okay. The truth is I just found it too complex; to alienating. Too cold. I loved metal, and some of the noise aspects appealed to me, but I was all about the raw fury of GnR, the punk spirit of Skid Row, and the grandiosity of W.A.S.P. (don’t judge). Whilst Closer, Heresy, and March Of The Pigs had elements that appealed to me, I found the whole thing a bit harsh and inaccessible… not to mention electronic, which for a kid tribally opposed to dance music was profoundly alienating.
 
What can I say? I was an idiot.
 
Later, thanks to an increased acquaintance with the work of Reznor protege Marilyn Manson, and my own maturing taste, I revisited that cassette, and finally began to connect with it properly, appreciating the elements I’d previously found difficult as being part of what made it such an achievement. Still, for all that I grew to enjoy The Downward Spiral, it remained an album I admired more than I actually loved.
 
And then came The Fragile. And there, I did fall in love.
 
I played it obsessively, a point of considerable irritation for my then-flatmates, who were not similarly enamoured. And I’m not going to engage anyone who prefers The Downward Spiral in a pointless debate about something that's ultimately a matter of taste, but for me, The Fragile remains Reznor’s masterpiece - a stunning double album study of alienation, despair, and oh-so-delicate love and hope. I devoured it. And when I heard NiN would be headlining day 2 of the Lost Weekend at Docklands Arena - then just a handful of stops on the DLR from where I lived - you'd better believe I made damn sure I got tickets.
 
And then, of course, they didn’t play.
 
It wasn’t anyone’s fault - the drummer got intestinal flu, and NiN drummer is not a gig anyone can step into at no notice.  Still, it was a pretty big disappointment, and I really felt like I’d missed a moment. While I did later get to see NiN again, at Brixton Academy as part of the pre-Year Zero tour (and jolly good it was, too) I still felt like I’d missed out on something special - the live iteration of a band and a performer at the very peak of their imperial phase.
 
Which is almost certainly what motivated me, despite the high cost and lack of a machine to actually play it on, to purchase And All That Could Have Been.
 
The DVD itself is fine. The sound production and 5.1 mix is to the insanely high standards you’d expect from a Reznor release, and the film is a pretty faithful, if utterly standard live show capture. An artifact of it’s manufacture in the early days of the DVD format is that the show is split over two disks, which I’ll admit to finding charming. The band are dynamic, the light show superb, and Reznor is as magnetic as I remember, if not more so; dynamic, but not afraid to be still; and the vocal performance is superb, raw but never cracked, pushed, but holding strong.  Still and all, it’s a concert DVD. If you like that kind of thing, it’s the kind of thing you’ll like - but I think most of what made it remarkable when it came out was how unusual it was, especially the sound mix. Revisiting it for this article, there’s nothing to recommend it over, say, Slipknot’s Disasterpieces or Springsteen's Live In Barcelona, save personal preference. It’s a great record of a band at the top of their game, in other words.
 
The songs, on the other hand…. Holy shit, the songs.
 
Terrible Lie leads off magnificently, that two chord opening a one two punch that’s elemental. It’s classic Reznor songwriting in both theme and content; angry lyrics of betrayal and wounded trust, coupled to a verse/chorus that deploys crunching guitars and sparse electronica to great effect. What elevates it, in common with many of Reznor’s singles, is how the song develops; through a middle 8 that turns from condemnation to pleading (‘please don’t take away from me/I need someone to hold on to’) before closing out with an extended new vocal line over the verse riff, turning the structure inside out, before leading into the anthemic coupling denouement of ‘I wanted so much to believe/you fucking promised me’, delivered with fury and passion.
 
Sin is next, with an extended intro before the heavy synth verse takes us to the shout-along chorus, and then Match Of The Pigs and Piggy serve up a slice of Downward Spiral angst. March…  is magnificent, a piledriver riff, pounding drums, and a searing vocal combined to great effect. The live setting adds even more energy to the song, as the band allows the chorus piano breaks to play out just a little longer than on the recording, milking the crowd anticipation before the verses crash back in. Similarly, with Piggy, Reznor leaves the stage during the final coda, walking in front of the barrier so the audience can sing ‘nothing can stop me now’. The crowd feels like a part of the performance even on the CD, but in the DVD, occasional glimpses of the impassioned audience show just how deeply this band is connecting.
 
Next, The Frail and The Wretched give us a double bill of The Fragile songs. The instrumental tracks are some of my favorite moments on The Fragile, and here, the delicate piano of The Frail serves a slow build, introducing the other instruments gradually, layering the sound, before the drums lead straight into The Wretched, strong contender for my favourite NiN song. It’s quintessential Reznor, fury and spite warring with sadness and pity, with the build to the chorus feeling like it’s coming up from a well of disappointed rage, (‘It didn’t turn out the way you wanted it, did it?’), and then the crushing ‘Now/you know/this is what it feels like’. The performance here is exceptional, too, the band pulling out all the stops to deliver a sound that has fidelity to the original recording, while still containing live flourishes that elevate the song. It’s fantastic, and when Reznor leans over the edge of the stage at the end, leaning into the front row and sings ‘You try to stop it/but it keeps on coming’... Yeah, I get pissed all over again about the Lost Weekend fiasco.
 
The double bass drum of Gave Up pounds in next, lifting the energy levels up. It’s an absolute belter of a number, leading to another classic Reznor denouement (‘I tried/ I gave up’) followed by a relentless, thrashing close. Magnificent, and the way Reznor flings his guitar into the air at the end, you can tell he knows it.
 
La Mer takes us back to Fragile territory, with another extended instrumental, and again the band commitment to reproducing the studio sound in a live setting impresses (as does the production), and The Great Below continues in the same vein, simmering and atmospheric, Reznor delivering an amazing vocal performance, moving through to highs that he commits to with breathtaking rawness. With the amount of deserved praise his songwriting and production  skills receive, it's sometimes easy to forget just what a superb singer Reznor is, and this performance is an exemplar of  that talent. The Mark Has Been Made closes out the Fragile trilogy of tracks with another instrumental; this one harsher, bringing the guitars back in, a spiraling riff that leads into a heavy-as-hell section that, guitar sound and production aside, wouldn't be out of place in a stoner metal set - at least until the wordless vocal kicks in.
 
The quick drop from there to Wish is a savvy choice, brining the energy back up to the roof with yet another pulverising riff alternating with a blistering vocal into a killer chorus. I think of Nine Inch Nails as primarily an album band, but listening to this has forcibly reminded me just what a talented writer of singles Reznor is; Like Terrible Lie, Sin, and Head Like A Hole, this is a brilliantly constructed, anthemic three minute thirty slice of genius. Dropping from here into Complication, another instrumental, shouldn't really work, but it’s such a fast paced, groovy riff that it lands fine, the energy of the performance carrying the crowd and band alike, before they drop into Suck. There’s similar funk bass stylings here that we’ll get on Closer, but the atmosphere is very different, especially when the chorus crashes in. Again I’m stuck by how well the instrumentation works in the verses, little guitar licks accentuating the space in the centre of the song before the wall of noise chorus, and the drop down middle eight that builds back up.
 
Closer is a song that deserves it’s own essay, frankly. Here, I’ll simply note it’s a brilliant rendition that captures all the menace, loathing and longing of the original recording. Similarly, Head Like A Hole bounces along with a gleeful, defiant rage that is as explosive as the recorded article, if not moreso. Coming back for the encore, Just Like You Imagined builds the final instrumental of the evening, before Starfuckers Inc. delivers an explosion of energy, especially in the drop down, where Reznor changes the lyric, adding a ‘fuck you’ that is sung out solo and pretty much brings the house down, before with a quick stick count the band crashes back in for a final pounding chorus.
 
The set ends with Hurt, as must surely have been mandated. Again, a song with an essays worth of signification, which I have to assume if you’ve come this far, you know all about. It’s fucking magnificent.
 
Like a lot of live albums, And All That Could Have Been serves as dual purpose in a lot of ways; it works both as a document of a specific tour, and a de-facto greatest hits album. As the tour in question is arguably the moment at which Nine Inch Nails peaked, it packs an especially powerful punch; a setlist that’s all killer, no filler, coupled with a swaggering confidence and a playing-out-of-their-skin ferocity that creates a superb listening experience. Sure, a purinst might wish for Big Man With A Gun or Heresy to round out the collection, but that would miss the other thing that makes this such a great live set, which is the ebb and flow of the songs themselves, with a running order that takes the listener on a journey through kinetic fast paced battering, but also slower, more melancholic moments.
 
I still think either The Downward Spiral or The Fragile represent the very, very best NiN have to offer, but as a document of a time and a tour when they were essentially unbeatable, this is exactly what you want a live album to be.
 
And yes, yes, I do still wish I’d been there.
 
KIT POWER
18/5/19