But the nice thing about the house, which I feel had nothing to do with what happened there, was that I wouldn't leave it for weeks. "If there was any sort of vibe then it was one of quiet, maybe sadness. "It's really quiet and secluded, yet it's also five minutes from the Whisky …" "The reason I was there is because it's a cool, nice house on this beautiful green mountainside that overlooks the whole city from the ocean to the downtown," he told Kerrang! in 1994. Reznor has insisted many times that he had rented the property before learning of its history. Most of the album was infamously written and recorded at Le Pig, Reznor's home studio at 10050 Cielo Drive in Beverly Hills, the same address where actress Sharon Tate, her unborn child, and four other people were murdered by followers of Charles Manson. On this record, I was more concerned with mood, texture, restraint and subtlety, rather than getting punched in the face 400 times." "I didn't want to box Nine Inch Nails into a corner, where everything would be faster and harder than the last record. "This time I wanted to make an album that went in 10 different directions, but was all united somehow," he told Guitar World in 1994. In 1992, NIN's heavily distorted Broken EP had signaled Reznor's move away from the clean and commercial sounds of 1989's Pretty Hate Machine now, nearly two years later, it was clear that Reznor's artistic vision had evolved even further. alone, and influenced just about every dark and edgy metal, hardcore and/or electronic act that came after it. Self Destruct," "March of the Pigs," " Hurt" and " Closer," which managed the difficult feat of being addictively catchy while also being unbearably intense, the densely layered record has sold almost 4 million copies in the U.S. Featuring harrowing and uncompromising tracks like "Mr. What I did know is how I felt about myself, and my struggles to figure out who and what and why from my own perspective.” And therein lies the album’s healing irony: In facing the abyss, Reznor found his congregation.On March 8th, 1994, Nine Inch Nails released The Downward Spiral, a landmark not just for Trent Reznor's career, but for hard, electronic-oriented music in general. “What do I have to say? I didn’t live this exotic life. “I was feeling my way around,” Reznor told Zane Lowe of the period leading up to Spiral. After Spiral, artists didn’t have to decide whether to be a rock band or an electronic producer-Reznor had bridged the two. If the album has an essentializing moment, it’s the climax of “Closer”: mechanistic synth-funk that gives way to a warped, solitary piano, part music box, part trash. Even now, it feels damaged, noisy, wrong-the product of both a gleaming future and an already ruined past. Mixing digital and analog, sample collages with live performances, densely processed signals with naturalistic ones, Spiral was a drastic renovation to the texture and feel of conventional rock. That you could whistle along with half of it was perverse but strangely fitting, especially given Reznor’s S&M affectations: Here was pain that felt pretty good. What emerged was a pattern of emotional whiplash: You feel like you can topple the world, shred your tormentors, vent your toxic depths. Even tracks that found continuity with the band’s earlier music-“Big Man with a Gun,” the stuttering hardcore of “March of the Pigs”-were drastically more aggressive than anything they’d done before, flashes of mania that made the album’s quieter moments feel all the more exhausted. Inspired by Iggy Pop, Lou Reed, and David Bowie’s Berlin trilogy ( Low in particular), Spiral pushed the industrial pop of Pretty Hate Machine and the Broken EP in unexpected directions, experimenting with torch songs (“Piggy”), disco and soul (“Closer”), and ballads of such unnerving fragility that listening to them feels voyeuristic (“Hurt”). (Reznor himself remains somewhat incredulous-a note on the band’s own website describes the album as a “celebration of self-destruction in the form of a concept record that somehow managed to become a multi-platinum worldwide hit.”) “I had to do it.”Įven in a shifted mid-’90s paradigm where bands like Nirvana could become famous, Spiral felt extreme-a blast of negativity so thorough that it’s hard to imagine it making headway with any size of audience, let alone the four million or so who ended up buying it. “Sorry,” Reznor remembered saying in a 2016 interview with Beats 1 host Zane Lowe. When Trent Reznor submitted The Downward Spiral to Interscope Records cofounder Jimmy Iovine, he offered an apology.
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