Nine Inch Nails - Not The Actual Events (2017) [24bit FLAC]

Nine Inch Nails mastermind Trent Reznor has spent decades griping about the music business, dating back to his complaints about TVT in 1992 and his resulting “secret recording sessions” of the Broken EP. Now in some ways, he is the music business, a power player whose pioneering moves—surprise releases, extreme secrecy, fanbase cultivation, big budget commercial soundtrack jobs—have become global-pop-star S.O.P. So when he boldly introduces his surprise new EP Not the Actual Events as “an unfriendly, fairly impenetrable record that we needed to make” there is some cause for both intrigue and healthy skepticism.

For longtime followers of Reznor, a few scenarios suggest themselves. Maybe he's hoping to stoke enthusiasm for a slight, 21-minute EP that mainly serves as a promotional tool for a trove of concurrent reissues. Maybe he thinks he's done something remarkable, because he still sees himself as an innovator, even though his output since reforming NIN in 2005 has been well-textured but either comfortably formulaic (With Teeth, Hesitation Marks, The Slip's first half) or uncomfortably ambitious (Ghosts I-IV, the second half of The Slip, parts of Year Zero). Optimists and diehards might wish for a third option: Maybe he's legitimately produced powerful and fresh music under the Nine Inch Nails banner. To Reznor’s credit and detriment, he's managed to touch on each scenario.

There are only a handful of examples in Reznor’s post-millennial NIN output where the group have departed from their turbulent, sturm-und-drang industrialism. There’s the piano and Vocoder-driven disco barnburner “All The Love In the World,” opener to the otherwise-toothless With Teeth; the gloomy, overlong and under-baked instrumentals-only closet-cleaner Ghosts I-IV; and on 2013’s Hesitation Marks, the baffling, sunny “Everything,” a rare major-key tune in the band’s catalog. The more interesting of these, “All the Love in the World” and “Everything,” are the opposite of “unfriendly” or “impenetrable”—their disarming warmth is what makes them memorable. Nine Inch Nails have spent nearly thirty years trading on a signature type of abrasive, parents-repelling industrial melancholia—they’ve provided decades’ worth of precedent in this style, and it would be it pretty damned difficult to release anything that could notably set itself apart on these terms. The band’s most “impenetrable” release so far is Ghosts, which demonstrates how that word can frequently mean “boring.”