Growing Up: The Nine Inch Nails album Trent Reznor thought was “immature”
Trent Reznor tends to feel like a musical craftsman more than a songwriter these days. Whether it’s his work in Nine Inch Nails or creating his signature film scores with Atticus Ross, Reznor usually has a way of painting with a fairly broad brush, making songs that break down the most dramatic problems someone can face and actually make them make sense. Every artist has to start somewhere, though, and Reznor wasn’t that enthused about Pretty Hate Machine shortly after it came out.
When the industrial maestro was first putting his songs together, Nine Inch Nails still weren’t technically a band. They had a name, and there were people who played instruments on tour, but the majority of the album was made when Reznor was still working at a studio, coming in on his off-hours to put together the greatest songs that he could.
While Reznor may have been making songs just to figure out the sounds in his head, the industrial rock world was responding a lot faster than he expected. After shopping his demos around to various labels, almost all of them offered him a deal for his songs, thinking that they had found the commercial answer to bands like Ministry.
There may have been some great singles, but Reznor had already washed his hands of the project once he went on tour, telling Select, “A lot of it sounds immature to me now. At first, it totally sucked. I became completely withdrawn. I couldn‘t function in society very well. And the LP became a product that. It‘s quite small-scale, introverted, claustrophobic — that‘s the feel I went for”.
Even though many of the songs feel like the kind of electronic metal songs that anyone could get down with, some of them also don’t hold up in retrospect. ‘Head Like a Hole’ has always been considered a throwaway by Reznor himself, and the rapping in a song like ‘Down In It’ is either genius or terrible, depending on how well you can stomach metallic rapping in a post-Vanilla Ice world.
For all of Reznor’s gripes, there is one fantastic song hidden in the track listing, ‘Something I Can Never Have’. Putting all of his sorrow into a few piano chords and his vocal performance, this song is the kind of wounded beauty that Reznor always wanted to capture, wondering if he’s running after a love he will never get.
That kind of vulnerability is practically the mission statement of where Reznor would go later. After going on tour and finding out that all of his problems were a lot worse than he’d imagined, The Downward Spiral is the product of ‘Something I Can Never Have’ being fully realised. Reznor is clearly not doing well on the second record, but the music he’s playing almost seems to point the way forward for him, either towards the darkness or to a more peaceful place.
Since its release, though, Pretty Hate Machine still feels like a product of its time in the best way possible. The synth tones might tip you off about the sheer 1980s-ness of it all, but when you look at where industrial music went from here, Reznor was still writing the blueprint for how the genre could go mainstream. Many industrial rockers may have liked being on the fringes of society, but if it weren’t for Reznor breaking down the door, the genre might have never ended up on the charts.
