The album Trent Reznor called “the best I can do”
As we all know from watching it manifest many a time, the pressures of fame, fortune, and a rock and roll lifestyle can often become too much to bear. Sustaining a string of albums that are meant to be each as successful as the last is almost like a pressure cooker of mounting stress, and it can lead musicians down dangerous roads to cope. None of this is a new phenomenon, but it’s a state of affairs that Trent Reznor and so many others know all too well.
For the Nine Inch Nails frontman, the boiling point of his breakneck career came at the turn of the 20th century, when it seemed like his streak of success was gradually heading down the pan. Picture the scene: their sophomore album, The Downward Spiral, shot the band to stardom in the mid-1990s, their following effort, The Fragile, was good but didn’t fare quite as well as its predecessor, and naturally, Reznor felt he had to complete a miracle to pull them out of an impending rut.
But the pressures of performing a divine intervention evidently were too much to ask, as the frontman subsequently fell into a serious alcohol and drug addiction in the early part of the 2000s, after The Fragile was released in 1999. It seemed all of Reznor’s creative prowess had been lost to the grip of his addiction for some time. He told Spin in 2005: “I was going to just drink myself or drug myself out of it. I got back to New Orleans after the Fragile tour, and I’d pretty much lost my soul.”
But indeed, the process of truly hitting rock bottom was perhaps what saved Reznor in the end, as prompted to go to rehab to kick his harmful habits, it re-enlightened him to his sonic visions once again. Over time, the result was 2005’s With Teeth, a searing magnum opus in which he laid bare all his starkest trial and gave them a reckoning to the future. Suddenly, the masses of commercial success didn’t seem quite as relevant, as Reznor had found the true power of music – its ability to rescue you.
To this end, the frontman later reflected: “I disappeared for five years to get my brain straightened out. I came back with a really dense album [With Teeth] that I think is the best I can do.” This may seem like a tempered assessment, but it also displays the sheer tenacity and ruggedness that went into the album; Reznor dragging the project with all his might until he was sure he would make it over the line.
In this sense, Reznor realised just how differently With Teeth compared to his other work when he said: “But it’s substantially different from what I’ve done in he past. It’s not as obvious. And it sold well, but it didn’t sell great.” Yet something had changed when he made the point about its sales – it wasn’t bitter, just conciliatory. “So now I’m settling into this,” he continued. “When I first started out, I’d ride around the country in a van ten times if I needed to. I’d do interviews all day if I needed to.”
As such, several lessons from the process of With Teeth became clear – sometimes your darkest moments force you to reconsider your sonic output, that commercial success isn’t everything, and that, ultimately, nothing costs more than your own sanity. It was an album that may not have sealed Reznor’s rock god fate entirely, but in many ways, it was the process that hinged on the continuation of his career after he reached his lowest ebb. No amount of money in the world can buy that.
