Admit it, there was a time when a Nine Inch Nails album was the hardest music in your CD collection. You slipped your Downward Spiral disc in to drown out — or perhaps embolden — the bitter angst seething within. That was likely in the 1990s and you got way more hardcore following elementary school.
More recent decades have not been as kind to Trent Reznor and Company, as a unit. (Although, Rezner has achieved solo success elsewhere, scoring little films like The Social Network and so forth.) But the band? It seemed to have lost its way. NIN’s most recent album was ’08 misfire, The Slip, appropriately titled.
But the band will tour this fall with Explosions in the Sky, and before that plays Outside Lands in SF; and now it all makes sense: NIN will release metal-grinding new full-length Hesitation Marks on Sept. 3.
As Stereogum precisely points out, the first single – “Came Back Haunted” – is “a ferocious return to the ‘classic’ NIN style.” Perhaps this ‘90s nostalgia thing will indeed play out a little longer.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgwrxcO48N8
Reminder: Outside Lands is Aug. 9-11 in Golden Gate Park. Tickets are available here. Regular three-day passes are $249.