I’ve always done things a little differently. I used to make Airfix models as a kid and having assembled my Messerschmitt Bf 109 – and only stuck my fingers to the chassis twice – I turned over the box to regard the options for painting. The first, and most prevalent, was perfect for duelling Spitfires over the Channel. Ducking and diving, trying to get a bead on the plucky Allied pilot and take them down.

Cool.

Or…there was option B, painted in the colours of Rommel’s desert campaign. No cloud cover, prime real estate for a fighter plane. Two choices, what to do?

Option 3. Some batshit crazy paint scheme that exists only in the twisted synapses of my brain, some weird blend of the two, but with extra cool stuff.
Option 3. It was always option 3.

In many regards, it was the same when I was getting into music. I would seek out an album to find my way in, yet time and time again, I’d eschew the popular and pick the outsider. Option 3 as it were. The first Pop Will Eat Itself album I ever bought was their live album, ‘At Weird’s Bar and Grill’. Slipknot, was ‘Iowa’, Green Day was ‘Kerplunk’. Time and time again, the first crack I’d give a band was one of their odd albums, which most fans would put towards the bottom of their list.

The same applies with Nine Inch Nails. When Alex asked what album I wanted, I knew which one I hoped was still free. As I saw him type on Messenger, no doubt informing me that The Fragile, Downward Spiral and With Teeth had already gone, I replied with four words.

Further. Down. The. Spiral.

There are a number of reasons why this album stands out for me, both musically and personally. Before I delve into the tracks, I’ll paint a picture of where I was in my life when I heard the (quite frankly bonkers) opening track.

I’m twenty years old, have just landed my first proper full-time job, sending bits of paper out for a financial company in Salisbury, the city of my birth. I’ve literally been living there for a month and I’m in a crappy bedsit above an art gallery at the bottom of Brown Street.

Life is pretty shit…not wanting to put a downer on it, but at that moment in time, life is sucking the sweaty balls of an obese person who has been doing squats for two hours straight. I’ve just split up with my first ever proper girlfriend, am living twenty odd miles away from my chums, in a tiny L-shaped room that contains all my worldly possessions. On Friday nights, there is a guy I bump into in the shared kitchen who makes chip butties with bread that is lined by green mould. He eats it, telling me in his Irish brogue, “Ma said that the green bits are the dessert part of the meal.” Of course it is. Little wonder I keep an eye on him to make sure the drunk motherfucker doesn’t pass out and set fire to us all.

Aside from the odd trip home to see people – I was still not on speaking terms with my parents after a rather fractious leaving home, music was pretty much all I had. Sure, in six months, life would turn around and I’d be in better digs, but right then? It was all way too much for me.

Coupled with all of that, I was still getting to grips with my mental state, and though I’d dealt with the more extreme urges of my personality, I was still fighting my brain every day to keep myself above water. It was a struggle, and again, Future-Me would love nothing more than to have left me a note telling Old-Me that it would be okay, that I’d find a way to be able to control the things that I worried every day would push me over the edge.

This album, this fucking album…it sums up perfectly that moment in my life. It’s a snapshot of the turmoil I was going through in my head.

I’d heard of Nine Inch Nails for years, but with a list of bands as long as time itself that I wanted to get into, it took me some time to get to them. The fact that it’s a remix album matters not one jot. Further Down The Spiral cranks into life with ‘Piggy (Nothing Can Stop Me Now)’, which lulls you in gently, before smashing you in the face with break beats and a churning maelstrom of industrial drums and chugging riffs.

Bear in mind, I’d never even heard The Downward Spiral by this point, so had no point of reference. But with the benefit of hindsight, I find Trent’s vocals on this, and most of the other songs, way clearer than the album they’re pulled from. ‘Piggy’ just builds and builds, dropping off for a temporary respite, before that last final assault. In that tiny dingy room, it was filled with those crunching guitars and nasty ass drums, before finally petering out with that wonderful little sample.

The next two tracks are essentially the same song, but oh so very different. Even listening to them now, puts me right back to where I was then. The first, ‘The Art Of Self Destruction, Part One’, is a claustrophobic affair. The lyrics are literal whispers through the speakers straight into your brain. “I am the voice in your head,” like, seriously, no shit. It’s insidious, the way it expands into every part of your skull, the sinister, “I control you,” said over and over again, simultaneously a promise and a status report. It’s the 1984 of songs. As you relax into it, give yourself to it, the tempo cranks up, the beat becomes discordant, the ordered opening gives way to chaos, to opposing thoughts and ideas.

It breaks perfectly into, ‘Self Destruction, Part Three’. This is the mania to the depression from the previous song. It just doesn’t let you settle. Always on the move, twisting, turning, pushing you this way and that, dropping you off only so it can deliver its sermon, before the now eerie, “I control you,” becomes a fact. It’s not up for debate any more, you’re pulled with it.

And then, BOOM. The adrenaline leaves you, and you’re deposited in a near-empty soundscape. Catching your breath, you can feel it building again. Pressing against the bone of your skull, and sure enough, it bursts back into life once more, the urgency and insistence is all-pervading, stripping you of the ability to do what you want.

‘Heresy (Version)’, is a blessed relief after the rollercoaster you’ve been exposed to so far, far more clinical and industrial in tone. If you stripped the vocals out, it could almost be a Rammstein song. A thunderous march from the bipolar beginning into the more stable middle part of the album. To be honest, you need it, I need it. ‘The Downward Spiral (The Bottom)’, takes it down a notch, haunting, aching, breathless, before descending into a techno blip-blop-blop which sets you up for what comes next. You know what’s coming up, don’t you? Were you ready that first time?

‘Hurt (Live)’, is a song that once you hear, breaks you down into your constituent parts and leaves you there for some considerable time. If ever there was a song that summed up how I felt right there and then, it’s this, and I know I wasn’t the only one. Today, people have the debate about which version is better, this one or Johnny Cash’s. For me, as good as The Man In Black’s version is - and it is a belter - it pales next to this version.

It’s raw, it’s breaking inside of you, it starts off kinda clunky, let’s be honest, but dear god…the crowd quietens and Reznor starts to sing. The music blooms as you get to that first chorus, building, building…you can feel it swell inside of you. Fingernails digging into the palms of your hands, teeth gritted, everything inside of you focused on those damn fucking words.

For me, it’s the best thing he ever wrote, it’s the sum of everything he aspired to in his early work. Stripped back, without any of the layers of noise you normally associate with NIN, this simple song is the soundtrack for those emotions that threaten to overwhelm you. Yet, it offers hope as much as it envelops suffering. Sure, it’s not your atypical, “let’s get a cup of tea and everything will be fine,” but you don’t want it that way. I didn’t at least. ‘Hurt’, leaves you bent over, broken, but knowing that the past is just a guide of where you’ve been, not of where you’re going.

Jesus, I went down a rabbit hole there. Hope you’re still with me? You are? Good work!  Honestly, that song is in my top three of all-time, and if any of you have any firm thoughts on it, let me know. I’ll even debate which version is better if you want. *insert smiley face*

With most albums, I’d put them on before going to work, or heading out in the evening for beer, so the back end of albums never really got that much attention, this one included. But, when you have four tracks in the first six that have tested your serotonin levels, you need a break.

‘At The Heart Of It All’, definitely gives you that, letting you compose yourself after the emotional tide you’ve ridden to this point. You don’t really think too much about it at the time, but later on when you read up about it, it is kinds odd that a song that NIN didn’t actually do is on here at all. But hey! It’s Aphex Twin, so you can’t complain. It’s like finding a bonus box of Christmas sweets at the back of the cupboard in February.

‘Ruiner (Version)’, unlike most of the songs, is quite one-dimensional, rarely dropping too low, or changing too much in tone and feeling. If anything, you’d kinda feel that with this up front ahead of ‘Piggy’ - especially given the last line, “nothing can stop me now” - might have made better use of it.
‘Eraser (Denial; Realization)’, is another that is perfect for background noise, but personally doesn’t do a great deal. It’s the classic remix song, where you end up playing the original and realising that there isn’t much you could do to make it better. It does chug along quite nicely, and the final third plays on the twisted psyche feel that this album really manages to do so well.

There were a number of different versions of the album, and the UK one ends up with ‘Self Destruction, Final’, which pulls in all of the elements from those that have been before. It isn’t a patch on the two earlier versions, instead blending the two together. To me it feels an unnecessary inclusion, especially given what else they could have used from the album they were remixing. Familiar loops play, and whilst it’s not terrible, it just feels like déjà vu.

Remix albums go two ways, they either offer you something wonderfully different, PWEI’s ‘Two Fingers My Friends’, is a good example, whilst others are just a waste of time, a shameless cash-grab. This is definitely in the former, as when I finally picked up ‘The Downward Spiral’ a few years later, although I enjoyed it, I found that a number of the songs seemed more distinct and purposeful on this album. Piggy, Self Destruction, and of course Hurt are the obvious ones, but I guess that is also the benefit of such a venture.
​
A big thanks to Alex for asking me to be a part of this. It had been a few years since I’d listened to this album from start to finish, and it really has not lost the impact that it had on me all those years ago. Sometimes, you need to put it away for a little while. Because some things leave an indelible mark, and remind you of times that, although long gone, could return at any moment. All you can hope to have in life are the things you truly love, music for me, is one of those.
 
Cheers.

The summer blockbuster book! Probably.

With an encyclopaedic knowledge of cake, and exclusive access to the church’s stockpile of holy weapons, the Order of the Crimson Rosary are on the frontline in the eternal war between good and evil. Whether it’s repelling demonic possession, judging the authenticity of supposed miracles or having the final say on the colour of bunting at church fetes, the organisation's members sacrifice their own freedom to keep the world safe.

Father Flynn, the top operative in the UK, has been responsible for a number of recent high profile gaffs. Given an ultimatum, he must choose between returning to his old job of preserving the last microfiche machine in the church’s library, or submit himself for rehabilitation.

Yet evil doesn’t take a ticket and wait in line, as the dreaded cannibal nuns from outer space land to begin their annual harvest. Can Flynn get himself sober enough to repel their evil machinations? Or will another idyllic British village become the nun’s latest buffet?

One thing’s for certain, to beat them, Father Flynn is going to have to kick the habit.

Book two in the GoreCom series, this time it's highly trained priests facing off against the titular cannibal nuns from outer space. Can the finest Crimson Rosary operatives in the UK thwart the nefarious plan to reduce another population centre to compote?

I try to avoid looking up what albums and songs mean for the artists that wrote them. It gets in the way of my own creativity. With each line of lyrics, I like to have at least two different ways to hear them and let them turn through me and mix around with whatever I’m working on and whatever else I’m listening to.

Without You I’m Nothing is one of the albums I listen to the most. It became my favourite album while I was at college studying media as the only girl in the class. I’d be picked on for my tastes and the boyfriend I was with at the time thought the music I listened to was too mainstream, so I hid behind a wall of black metal. College was also the first time someone tried to take my creativity away from me instead of encouraging it, taking away everything that made me, me and gift it back as a corruption of what once was.

Placebo is still my favourite band, but this album was moved down to second most favourite album of all time during university. I’m not writing about my favourite album at this point in time as it is too close to Sparky the Spunky Robot’s release date (22 February 2019) and I don’t want to give any of the tricks in the narration away until people have a chance to read it and form their own opinions. I’m hoping Gingernuts of Horror will have me back at some future date to write about my favourite album and what impact it had on Sparky.
 
Pure Morning

“Our thoughts compressed, Which makes us blessed, And makes for stormy weather”

To me, it sounds like enmeshment and a toxic relationship. What I’ve been working on right now, Era Two (or Tainted Love/Push the Button across my social media pages) is all about toxic relationships and there’s some enmeshment going on.
 
Brick shithouse

“When you come(cum) you never make a single sound”

Even during the Dark Days, this particular lyric would come up when I was writing. It could be a sociopath or a peeping tom watching from the bushes or the doorframe in silence. Watching someone sleep. Someone zoning out during sex so they aren’t reacting. Someone never making a noise during sex. Someone gagged. There’s so much I can do with it and it can go in so many different directions.
 
You Don’t Care About Us

“You're too complicated, we should separate it You're just confiscating, you're exasperating This degeneration, mental masturbation Think I'll leave it all behind, save this bleeding heart of mine”

Much like Pure Morning, it is hard to pinpoint an exact way in which You Don’t Care About Us has seeped into my writing. What first attracted me to Placebo was the way the lyrics fit so well together while still being simple words. Writing a song and writing a book are a bit different, but I do try to get my words to fit together like Placebo lyrics. 56 Seconds is the most noticeable. But even with Sparky the Spunky Robot, I wanted it to read really easily and then have the reader going back to see if there’s anything underneath it. Sometimes if I’m stuck on something, I’ll say these lyrics.
 
Ask for Answers

“These bonds are shackle free, wrapped in lust and lunacy. Tiny touch of jealousy, these bonds are shackle free”

“Wrapped in…” must be one of the most common phrases I’ve been using in Era Two.

Ask for Answers was the first thing I thought of when someone described what sounds like a very intense trauma bond to me. He presented this woman and apparently the love as of his life as someone who had been badly abused. And then said, there’s an undeniable bond. He didn’t describe anything positive about this woman. It was all bad things that happened to her at some point in the past and the more he said, the more toxic she sounded, as well as the people surrounding her (and him). They’ve got their children wrapped up in all of this, so they’re telling the next generation, “hey, be miserable and enmesh yourself in other people’s problems and be shallow”. But he could just walk away from it all. I did create the Tentacle Queen based on this (see Burger Queen below).
 
Without You I’m Nothing

“I'm unclean, a libertine And every time you vent your spleen I seem to lose the power of speech You're slipping slowly from my reach You grow me like an evergreen You've never seen the lonely me at all”

I wanted to copy and paste all the lyrics. I love this song. It is one of my favourite songs of all time. I’ve gone with what flows the best. But the beginning may have had the most influence upon my work.

This is not a concept I believe in, but it is something I enjoy exploring in writing. So many times, I have heard something along the lines of he/she/they complete me. People should be complete before they enter relationships. Era Two (Tainted Love/Push the Button) explores the incompletion.

Marcy loses 56 seconds of her soul and the books and stories explore her trying to claw back each piece. Having her identity stolen by Kord so he could complete her, because she was whole at the start of Strip/Becoming. It is something I’ve experienced myself when people aren’t respecting my boundaries. They’re trying to take away something I had as a part of me and then replace it with what they say it should be. Nothing more than a shallow corruption of what once was. A large part of Era Two (Tainted Love/Push the Button) is healing from all of this, while clawing back my old levels of creativity. I’m no longer doing things for the sake of doing them like I was during the Dark Days when I churned out book and story after book and story at 5AM, often to a brief. I’m taking song lyrics and books and everything else and corrupting it in my own way and making it into something new, like I used to do.

The people I speak to with this needing another half seem to rest their happiness on another person. Even if the other person is as close to perfect as can be, that’s a lot of pressure. This needing another person to feel complete is something I had pounded into me from childhood. It was one of the first things I set out to change while at university and in a pretty miserable relationship with that same college boyfriend mentioned earlier. Going out in the world, I discovered a lot of people hold firm to this belief.

My writing in a post #metoo world has been exploring this and looking at all the ways relationships can and do turn toxic after lots of interactions with people and (now ex) partners with the point of view that everyone needs someone to complete them. Every time I have raised an objection to needing someone to complete me, I get silenced.

This is the song that speaks to me the most on the album (and out of all the Placebo songs). And I like the general flow of the song.
 
Allergic (to thoughts of Mother Earth)

“Don't let me down”

Everyone is going to let you down. At some point in Era Two, Faded Star is going to let Marcy down. Marcy is either in love with or idealises Faded Star. She isn’t sure. Love and lust are often mistaken for each other. But one story, and she’ll come for him in the night and carry him off to the Forest of the Dead. Because he’s only human. He can and will let people down, even if light does shine out of his arsehole.
 
The Crawl

“It's way too broke to fix No glue, no bag of tricks”

Every relationship in Era Two is broken and traumatic. The characters themselves are broken, with Marcy and Donnie being the two that most operate in the grey areas of a somewhat balanced individual. Faded Star is too good (although I am trying to tone that down a bit). The Tentacle Queen and her minions are too evil and manipulative. Honey is an empty shell always glued to her phone or screaming inside Donnie’s head. There isn’t much middle ground in the characters mentality. These characters are too broken to fix.
 
Every You Every Me

“Carve your name into my arm Instead of stressed I lie here charmed 'Cause there's nothing else to do”

This is one of X/Xanthe’s songs (“Theatrum Mortuum” in VSX and The Year’s Best Hardcore Horror 3), along with a few other Placebo songs. Including My Sweet Prince (although not as important as Post Blue from the Meds album or The Never-ending Why from Battle for the Sun). X/Xanthe was conceived while at the day job one icy Tuesday morning during the Dark Days. I had a deadline and no notebook with me so I found my morbidly obese goth arse trying to run down the street to get home. I was in a particularly foul mood about having to go to the day job. At some point I had tried to pick up the pieces of my life (I don’t know how much time had passed) by setting up a business. Setting up a business is stressful enough with the right support. During this time, I had a lot of negativity around me and people trying to strip away my identity and replace it with what they wanted me to be, right down to my son’s school. This was a pre #metoo world so phoning the police was never an option. I’m guessing my boyfriend at the time didn’t like me trying to regain some independence. The character basis for X/Xanthe is one of his friends. I thought she was my friend too, until she wanted to sleep with me while I was trying to set up this business and clutch back the pieces of my life. I’m straight and pretty prudish, but even if I wasn’t, that wouldn’t have been the time to do that. The boyfriend failed to grasp why I was upset and no longer wanted this person anywhere near me. I didn’t even have any words of comfort from him. I don’t really know how this song came to be associated with X/Xanthe, except it happened on that Tuesday morning. Theatrum Mortuum was called Sucker Love in the first draft. I’ve been working on another X/Xanthe story and novel, before I bring her back in Smothered Hope. I guess people like torture porn as she seems to be a reader favourite.

“Carve your name into my arm”.

In 56 Seconds, Honey has carved her name into Donnie’s mind, but he still can’t remember it. The song was playing when I added that part. I’m sure song has an impact on my writing without consciously thinking about it, like I did with Honey and X/Xanthe.
 
My Sweet Prince

“Me and the dragon can chase all the pain away”

With X/Xanthe I viewed the Prince as being heroin. Once I had the heroin in place on that icy Tuesday morning, I had my story. X/Xanthe wakes up in the Forest of the Dead. She is dead. Does she still have an addiction in Theatrum Mortuum (Reprised)?

Heroin plays a big part in some of the Era Two stories, at least in note form. I’ve written Tainted 07 (unpublished), a short story and the opening paragraph is used syringes. I grew up in the USA, but I haven’t been back since the heroin epidemic. There was a time at some point during the Dark Days where I was getting one or two phone calls or messages per day saying someone I grew up with or went to school with had passed away. Although I only lost one inner circle friend to heroin, it has an impact.

There’s no poppies in the meadow in the Forest of the Dead. They’ve been used to manufacture heroin.

Taking dragon as a literal mythical creature, the first story in Era Two is “The Last Human” and the theme for that anthology (Where There Are Dragons – an anthology of mixed emotions) was dragons. Since that first story, I’ve been trying to reference dragons in each (although I’m sure I’ve cut them out during editing in some of them). No dragon, then there’s heroin.
 
Summer’s Gone

“You try to break the mould Before you get too old You try to break the mould Before you die”

Donnie, the washed-up deejay with two rings in his pocket. An engagement ring and a cock ring. Bound in trauma to the Tentacle Queen, he rides his white horse through the Forest of the Dead and licks the trees. I first introduce him in 56 Seconds as having a total lack of social skills and borderline rage dying on the sheets after sending jerk off footage to either Marcy or Honey. The rings themselves switch. The engagement ring is for Honey, the cock ring is for Marcy. The cock ring is for Honey, the engagement is for Marcy.

He’s old and aging. Honey can step out of the cage inside his head for four seconds and erase the lines around his eyes with her thumb. He’s trapped in a 56 second drum loop and that carries over to other Era Two stories he appears in.

Each time the horse dies, he starts to lick the tainted honey that oozes out of the trees. It is his own way of trying to break out and escape the same cycle he has been in.
 
Scared of Girls

“The earth did open Swallow whole”

Darcy is swallowed by the Void and then she climbs back out again, past mass graves and disturbs the dead. The Child That Has Always Been is swallowed by the Forest of the Dead in The Daisies That Open at Midnight. The ground opens to swallow her body.

“Her younger sister, had a blister Where I kissed her on her thigh”
                 
Love (cum) drips down Honey’s thigh. This is where that came from.
 
Burger Queen

“Things aren't what they seem Makes no sense at all”

I reworded this song to be about the Tentacle Queen while being informed of someone’s ex-girlfriend (see Ask for Answers). She sounded just like every other ex-girlfriend described to me, toxic, yet infatuating. The bonds of trauma and lust are strong. Beloved by hundreds yet sounds like she cuts a sad figure like the person described in the song. He didn’t have anything positive to say about this woman. She sounds like she uses past trauma to manipulate people into feeling sorry for her, so she gets looked after (the vampire queen).

The entire group of people associated sound like they’re bound together with trauma and emotional manipulation and one-upmanship (“out-narcing frenemies”, a phrase I used a lot in Strip/Becoming, which was written before I knew this group of people existed). When a large group of people is encouraging a disordered person to behave like that, instead of questioning their behaviour, it drags down the entire group. I’m not sure if there’s any medical or scientific backing for this, but if the disordered person is challenged, then maybe, that would give them the proverbial slap outside the head they need instead of dragging down everyone around them.

The person who described this to me has flashes of intelligence and insight and even works a creative industries job. I try not to project my experiences onto other people after ten additional years of narcissistic abuse, but he basically described, without knowing what I’ve been through, what I’ve been trying to escape from. When I was wrapped up in all of that, I would get the occasional flashes of insight and creativity, but my personality had been so drained, these were becoming fewer and further apart. When I did finally get away, I was left very confused. My memories were disjointed. I don’t want anyone to experience what I have. It isn’t very nice. I’m going to be picking up the pieces for a few more years yet, until I have at the very least, the very practical things I require to properly move on. My stress levels vary to between post-traumatic to non-existent, with more around the non-existent or every day types of stress these days.

This group of people described to me have children between them, which is where the Tentacle Queen’s children come from. The Child That Has Always Been is her own child. Donnie’s kidnapped daughter, so she’s wrapping Donnie’s child in her world and teaching her how to get what she wants by not lifting a finger (or hook in the children’s cases, she cuts off their hands so she can have their fingerbones for her necklace). She is in the middle of hatching a third (Caught on the Outside).

She first appears in The Daisies That Open at Midnight. She owns Joyce and Kord, they both have the mark of a devil. She’s more than a devil. She is the Void. People like that are a void. They suck away life and happiness and anything positive about living and leave confusion and self-doubt behind, while making the person or persons on the receiving end believe they need that person in their life.

In the Forest of the Dead, where The Daisies That Open at Midnight is set, illusions are washed away. I’m still writing it and having a vampiric land octopus played seriously is rather difficult. In other stories, she wears a mask to hide behind, which is what narcissists and people with other personality disorders do. To an extent, we all wear masks around certain people, but the Tentacle Queen has a latex mask. She’s the brothel owner between worlds. The place where men (and women) go when they want servicing by a sexbot.

Creating the Tentacle Queen was the first time I used this song in my writing on any conscious level.

Evil Dildo (the secret track).

I don’t like this one as much as I like Black Market Blood, the secret track on Black Market Music. Once Burger Queen is over, I used to switch off the disc and then skip to the next track on my ipod. And then Spotify happened so if I listen to the album on Spotify, I usually end up with this song blasting in my ears. One day, it might play a role in my art or writing, but today is (probably) not that day.

I've had a few false starts at writing this particular review – partly because so much has already been said about this album, and equally because it's somewhat hard for me to pin down exactly how important this particular album means to me. When I reel off my favourite five albums ever, the top two tends to fluctuate between this and NIN's next full album, The Fragile. In a way that and The Downward Spiral make for fascinating bedfellows – today's offering has a dark and nihilistic tone, but softens the harsh edges of the Broken EP that proceeded it with softer and more melodic tracks such as Piggy, A Warm Place and of course Hurt. The Fragile covers a wider range in terms of mood and styles, and which one of these two albums is my favourite probably depends on my mindset on any given day.

So if you wanted to read about the amazing platinum-selling success of this album, the difficult recording, the controversies upon release and the rest about this iconic album, that's all out there for you, but for today I just want to focus on my own emotional connection with this one.

The Downward Spiral launches with the opening salvo of Mr Self Destruct, a track with a brutal rhythm that seems to lay down something of a manifesto for this whole album. The Downward Spiral has been interpreted as telling the story of an individual on their way to suicide, and it's not hard to weave that thread as you listen through this album if you wish to. Piggy is a fascinating follow-up track, being much gentler and less discordant, but it only proves a brief respite before the aggression contained within both Heresy and notably March of the Pigs. March is renowned for its extremely unusual musical pattern, as well as one of my favourite video recordings where Trent Reznor absolutely wrecks about two or three mic stands in the space of about four minutes.
 
Two of Nine Inch Nails' best known songs reside on this album, the first coming in the form of Closer, which was a regular floor-filler at alternative clubs all through my college and University days. It still holds up at a less rock-oriented number with a sexual edge, especially when you don't hear it every week on rotation from an alternative night DJ. As a side note, I've always loved the 'Precursor' version of this track, almost as much as the original.

The thing that is incredible about The Downward Spiral is that no matter how well it begins, it just doesn't let anything slide in terms of quality as you work through. Ruiner and Eraser make for a great double-header, and I can't emphasise how much I just love The Becoming. It's a song I'll often come to when I'm at my lowest, because it feels like one of those tracks that simply nails the feeling of depression, with the anguished cries towards the end of the song from Reznor simply exacerbating this feel. I wouldn't exactly call it a pick-me-up, but often there's as much value in knowing that somebody else has felt the same sort of thing. Reptile is another staggering track, bringing in more industrial effects and strange, otherworldly lyrics in a track that I often find myself trying to unpack but never really feeling as though I have satisfyingly gotten to the bottom of.

And then, we close with Hurt. Hurt. I feel like I have no other words – it's a song that's incredibly simple and beautiful and heartbreaking, and the perfect closing note for this – or any – album. The fact that a musical great like Johnny Cash would want to cover it tells its own story of the emotional impact this song has. When I saw the band live last year, and the whole room sang along every word, I don't mind admitting I shed a tear – more than one, in fact. It was a properly unforgettable moment. I'd hope that whatever legacy NIN leave behind them, people looking in from all strands of music will be able to see Hurt for one of the greatest songs ever written, period.

The Downward Spiral felt like a band and a performer coming of age, casting off the heavy influence that had come before and forging ahead to produce something unique. It outstrips any of the band's previous output in terms of ambition, scope and – dare I say – achievement, and launched a whole new era where the band would be one of the biggest in the world for a long time. It's an album I invariably listen to all the way through – something I can rarely say for much else in my collection – because I feel as though you lose something in taking out any individual track, even the ones I would say stood out the least. The Downward Spiral is often considered the band's best work, and with very good reason – although, as I mentioned, The Fragile is certainly not a record to be underestimated...