“Unpleasant”: the album Trent Reznor cut short
Trent Reznor isn’t exactly known for making pleasant music, or more precisely, music that is designed to be comforting. His output with Nine Inch Nails has often been characterised by its intensity and deliberate ugliness, and this is what has always earned the project praise for making challenging music that also manages to be invigorating. That being said, there was even a point where Reznor managed to disgust himself to the point that he chose to cut an album short due to how full-on and distressing the process was.
After the release of the group’s debut album, Pretty Hate Machine, in 1989, there was a five-year wait until they released their follow-up album, The Downward Spiral. However, that doesn’t mean that Reznor wasn’t hard at work during this period, and there were plenty of things going on behind the scenes that prevented a full-length album from being released any sooner. What would come next for the band was their 1992 EP, Broken, which marked a significant transition in the project’s trajectory.
An ongoing dispute between Reznor and his label, TVT, meant that work on the next project was stunted by feuds. TVT had refused to terminate their contract with Nine Inch Nails after Reznor accused them of trying to interfere with his process and marketing the group as a commercial prospect. While Interscope had unofficially offered a deal to release their next record, Reznor had to work in secret and under various pseudonyms in order to avoid the label finding out that he was planning to release elsewhere.
Things got dark for Reznor around this time, and the stress of having to work in secrecy weighed him down significantly. He was determined to push his music in more extreme directions in order to avoid succumbing to the pressure of being commercially successful, but his artistic ambitions also provided extra stress due to the dark nature of the new, more abrasive sound that he was developing at the time.
While Broken was a critical success, it wasn’t the album that people had been anticipating for a long time, and it marked a change in sound that reflected the sense of alienation that Reznor had been feeling. Its violent and misanthropic attitude makes for an uncomfortable listen, and even Reznor was aware that a full-length album in this vein would be a tough sell for listeners to latch onto.
In an interview for Chaos Control Magazine, Reznor revealed just why the creation of Broken was such a laborious process, and one that was marred by the ongoing issues with TVT. Due to working in secret, he said that “it forced the way that it was recorded to be a small chunk of time here, a small chunk of time there,” adding that this also took a toll on his working arrangement with producer Mark ‘Flood’ Ellis. “Flood and my working relationship was a good one, but we decided that enough was enough. Those songs were done, with the exception of ‘Happiness in Slavery’, and I didn’t want to make a whole album that sounded like that.”
“It was hard to make, and it was an unpleasant experience throughout the whole thing,” Reznor concluded. “I wanted it to sound that way, and I didn’t want to bog down a whole record of that sound.” Despite feeling as though the themes of the record and its sound might be a little intense for the whole duration of an album, Reznor would then go on to make The Downward Spiral, and if that’s not a challenging listen, then I don’t know what is.
