 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. 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. LAURA MAURO 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. Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/l.n.Mauro Twitter: https://twitter.com/LauraNMauro Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.co.uk/lauranmauro/
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