Every Nine Inch Nails Album Ranked - Slant Magazine (2024)

From the post-adolescent rage of Pretty Hate Machine, to the political rage of Year Zero, to the impending middle-age rage of Hesitation Marks, the catalog of the Nine Inch Nails presents a musical map of Trent Reznor’s psyche over the course of the last three decades. If the exorcizing of his demons feels, by this point, almost performative, he’s diversified the NIN sound enough that even the most seemingly regressive sonic tangent somehow sounds fresh. The band’s latest album, Bad Witch, is more of an EP (Reznor admitted the decision to call it an “album” was a calculated one, since EPs tend to “get lost”), but however you choose to classify it, we’re celebrating the release of Halo 32 by taking a look back at Reznor and company’s catalog and ranking all nine of their releases from worst to best. Sal Cinquemani

9. The Slip (2008)

The underlying pop sensibility of Reznor’s music, even in his most aggressive work, has been slowly stripped away over the years. Individual songs on The Slip aren’t particularly dynamic. The album has two levels: loud (“1,000,000” features all the chainsaw- and motorcycle engine-guitars we’ve come to expect from NIN) and soft (“Lights in the Sky” is a tuneless, minimalist piano dirge). One of the few exceptions is “Corona Radiata,” which slowly builds from spacey arpeggios and planetarium atmospherics to a quiet storm of ambient house beats and distant guitar drones. Reznor’s stunted self-deprecation grew tired years ago, but his latter-day output has ventured into politics and more grown-up existential examinations. “Letting You” addresses the “politics of greed,” with lots of smoke stacks, black skies, and civil complacency, but he’s recorded this song before, and more sardonically. Cinquemani

8. With Teeth (2005)

By 2005, the long gaps between each new Nine Inch Nails album made Reznor’s shtick stick, even while the lapse in time magnified the adolescence of his angst and upped the musical stakes to heights he could never reach. And on With Teeth, he didn’t even seem to try. Instead, he sounds content with self-satisfaction, only subtly aware of what’s going on in the world outside his studio. There are hints at evolution: In the midst of the new new wave, it wasn’t surprising to hear Reznor fall back on his synth-pop past, from “All the Love in the World,” with its house-y second half, to lead single “The Hand That Feeds,” which harks back to the pop sensibility of Pretty Hate Machine. If nothing else, it was refreshing to hear him singing falsetto. Cinquemani

7. Ghosts I-IV (2008)

A collection of 36 untitled instrumental tracks split across four nine-track EPs, Ghosts I-IV is often described as Reznor’s ambient album. But many of these soundscapes—particularly the grinding, overdriven likes of “08” and “24”–are too fitful and noisy to meet Brian Eno’s definition of ambient music: “as ignorable as it is interesting.” More accurately, then, Ghosts is Reznor’s beat tape: a distillation of the clattering drum-machine rhythms, ear-rending guitar noise, and elegiac piano passages that have been NIN’s bread and butter, unmoored from the demands of pop structure and the increasingly confining grimness of his lyrical voice. Of course, the project also serves as a preview of Reznor’s soundtrack work with Atticus Ross (both “14” and “35” would be remixed for David Fincher’s The Social Network). Viewed on its own merits, Ghosts is nothing more or less than a testament to Reznor’s legacy as one of the most influential sonic stylists of the last 30 years. Zachary Hoskins

6. Bad Witch (2018)

Mutation as a theme has always rippled through Reznor’s songwriting, and his most recent work finds him shifting emphasis from personal to social forms of transformation and decay. The singer may have once fixated on frenzied individual self-destruction, but with Nine Inch Nails’s ninth album, Bad Witch—a six-track, 30-minute release that’s technically part of a recent trilogy of EPs—he wrestles with his dismay over being part of a depraved culture that’s showing signs of impending collapse. While 2016’s Not the Actual Events explores dissociative identities and 2017’s Add Violence brims with paranoia about our increasingly simulated reality, Bad Witch moves past such insular anxieties and more directly acknowledges that society’s chaos is the result of our collective hubris. Reznor blames the exponential advancement of technology for magnifying humanity’s basest impulses. An ineffable—yet relatable—sense of unease drives home the album’s exploration of confronting a once familiar environment rendered alien and grotesque. Josh Goller

5. Hesitation Marks (2013)

What are hesitation marks but a tangible reminder of a very specific, very painful failure? Death invites closure and acceptable answers. Living holds the door open to questions and decay. Reznor’s first-person characterizations of passive victimhood in the past almost always at least used threats as evidence of agency. Here his comparatively muted tone suggests a willing capitulation. In almost every way, this is the least outré effort NIN has proffered since Pretty Hate Machine. It’s focused but inquisitive, as opposed to declarative. “How did we get so high?” a disillusioned Reznor asks at the climax of “All Time Low,” not so much marveling at any current experience as he is interested in receiving a reminder from whoever has the road map. But more so than anything from Reznor’s own back catalog, Hesitation Marks’s congregation of belatedly encroaching pre-dotage and the reflexive drive for relapse that accompanies it feels reminiscent of Prince’s The Black Album, or rather a mirror image of it wherein its creator struggles to play by the rules to appease external demons. Even perusing the titles of Hesitation Marks—“Various Methods of Escape,” “Disappointed,” “While I’m Still Here,” “Came Back Haunted”—invokes feelings of knowing pity. No longer a “Big Man with a Gun,” Reznor’s approach is now irreversibly utilitarian. Eric Henderson

4. Year Zero (2007)

After four albums of near-suffocating internality, Reznor turned his gaze to the outside world on 2007’s Year Zero, and, unsurprisingly, the picture he painted isn’t a pretty one. Taking on the George W. Bush administration, Year Zero depicts an Orwellian nightmare of hypernationalism, religious fundamentalism, and state-sanctioned mass distraction. It’s a testament to our current dystopia that the lyrics have aged as well as they have, but it’s to Reznor and collaborator Atticus Ross’s credit that the music has had similar longevity. Eschewing the more dated alt-rock trappings of 2005’s With Teeth, Reznor sounds reinvigorated: chopping up sampled guitars into a jagged patchwork on “My Violent Heart”; forcing tortured, mechanical bleats out of his synthesizer on “Meet Your Master”; and turning the drum machine up all the way into the red for the pulverizing coda of “The Great Destroyer.” His most sonically unsparing album in over a decade, Year Zero proved that Reznor could be even more arresting when his scorn was aimed at something other than himself. Hoskins

3. The Fragile (1999)

Few would mistake Reznor for an optimist, but 1999’s sprawling The Fragile contains more silver linings than most Nine Inch Nails albums. Audacious in scope, the art-rock double album brims with atmospheric lamentations on the tenuous grasp on both sanity and human connection, with Reznor providing a bleak thesis statement on “Into the Void” as he sings, “Tried to save myself, but myself keeps slipping away.” Coming off the self-negating The Downward Spiral, though, The Fragile finds Reznor consistently reaching out to others, however futilely, rather than simply tearing himself apart from within. Throughout the album, there’s a glimmer in the darkness, as Reznor both draws strength from others and offers up his own, singing, “I won’t let you fall apart,” on the title track. Lyrically, Reznor may take a more straightforward and simplistic approach here than he had in the past, but musically, the album draws from a more diverse sonic palette—shifting from moody, ambient soundscapes to distortion-laden guitar tracks like “No, You Don’t,” perhaps the most overtly heavy metal song the band has recorded—in providing an expansive and breathtaking view into the abyss. Goller

2. Pretty Hate Machine (1989)

Louder and edgier than the synth-pop of bands like Depeche Mode but less abrasive than the industrial rock of Ministry and Skinny Puppy, Nine Inch Nails’s debut album, Pretty Hate Machine, married post-punk’s dehumanized nihilism to the more subjective, personal angst of grunge, which would consume rock music just a couple of years later. It may not have been as commercially successful as Nirvana’s Nevermind, but the album’s influence was almost as pervasive. Reznor wouldn’t reveal his full potential until 1994’s more ambitious, art-rock-inflected The Downward Spiral, but—from the righteous, omni-directional rage of “Head Like a Hole” and “Terrible Lie,” to the queasy, sadomasoch*stic eroticism of “Sin,” to the tortured “Something I Can Never Have,” an oasis of warped beauty amid all the stylized ugliness—Pretty Hate Machine contains the seeds of all that would come after it. Hoskins

1. The Downward Spiral (1994)

Much like its self-destructive narrator, 1994’s The Downward Spiral seethes and surges, refusing to settle into any singular mode in what is nevertheless Nine Inch Nails’s most thematically cohesive album. Squalls of abrasive industrial textures and thrumming, minimalist techno intertwine with throbbing basslines, looping shrieks, and plinking piano interludes as the album ebbs and flows from simmering portent to explosive agony. Reznor, suffering from severe depression and addiction at the time, charts a solipsistic, semi-autobiographical descent into nihilistic madness that results in visions of bloody suicide in the album’s penultimate title track. Along the way, he explores abject psychological deterioration manifesting in monstrous ways: decrying humanity’s corruptors on “March of the Pigs”; seeking escape through primal sex on “Closer”; being infected by evil on “Ruiner”; and on “The Becoming,” physically transforming into an inhuman, unfeeling machine in order to stop the torment. The malignant internal corruption builds, on tracks like “Eraser,” to the point of annihilation in one the most punishing and unrepentant expressions of existential dread to come out of a musical era largely defined by such gloom. Goller