‘Year Zero’: How Nine Inch Nails launched the greatest mystery in rock
At the time of writing, the year is 2025. At this point, some of the most influential and legendary pieces of sci-fi and cyberpunk writing should have already come to pass. We should have had a Space Odyssey in 2001. We did not. Blade Runner should have happened six years ago. It did not. Hell, we’re nearly 30 years out from the events of Escape from New York. To be clear, the world envisioned in those stories was never really meant to be an accurate imagining of what life on Earth would look like during the narrative timelines. However, that was not the case with the 2022 Nine Inch Nails concept album, Year Zero.
After all, talking about a United States of America in the clutches of a theocratic, fascist regime that polices every movement and decision of its people; that is locked in constant war with its neighbours in an imperialist conquest gambit; where dissenters are regularly seized from their homes and disappeared in military-grade operations conducted by shady government agencies—Trent was only three years off.
Now, as painfully on the money as Year Zero was with its predictions of what the United States government would be guilty of in the 2020s, that isn’t the story that we’re here to talk about. It involves underground rebel groups, psychoactive drugs and enormous, ghostly hands reaching down from the sky. It’s all pretty cool, but nowhere near as cool as how this story was told.
You see, the Year Zero project began in February 2007. YouTube was still in its infancy, so NIN weren’t going to go down the Ghosts route of making a campy miniseries to contain their lore-drops. Instead, the band turned to the achingly mid-2000s concept of the alternate reality game (ARG). In doing so, they made one of the best, most compelling and most ingenious examples of the whole medium.
How did Nine Inch Nails begin the ‘Year Zero’ ARG?
It began, as a lot of extremely cool things do, with a t-shirt. Two months before the album’s release, a t-shirt was uploaded to the band’s online shop. Those who bought it found that on the tour dates listed on the back, certain letters were highlighted. When combined, these letters formed the sentence “I am trying to believe”. This led to the discovery of “iamtryingtobelieve.com”, the first in a network of websites set in the universe of Year Zero.
Now, online rabbit holes are cool. Anyone who was there for the virtual frenzy that Cloverfield inspired when that iconic teaser dropped can attest to that. Y’know what’s cooler? A USB flash drive found in the bathroom of the first-ever NIN concert in Portugal on Valentine’s Day 2007. One that contained the first song released from Year Zero, ‘My Violent Heart’, which was leaked onto the internet shortly afterwards.
This would happen again in Barcelona a few days later, but this time, the drive contained another new song, ‘Me, I’m Not’ and a burst of static. When savvy fans analysed the frequency with a spectrogram, it revealed a phone number, which, when called, led fans further down the rabbit hole. The game went on for a further two months, with clues hidden in everything from flyers handed out at concerts to the live album Beside You in Time.
Each of these clues would lead fans to new parts of the Year Zero story and to the early promotional material for the album. The record’s lead single, ‘Survivalism’, premiered via a few USB drives handed out at the March 11th NIN concert at London’s Brixton Academy, and it also contained its music video.
All this came to a head on April 13th in Los Angeles, California. In the album’s story, a movement called ‘Art is Resistance’ was the force leading an uprising against the fascist government. On one of the forums found in the game, the call went out for like-minded people to join the group in a meeting, somewhere in LA. At this meeting, those who attended were given ‘kits’ containing bandanas, pin badges, flags and, for 25 lucky attendees, a pre-paid cellphone that could receive, not make, phone calls.
A few days after, they received a call on their new phones asking them to spread the word about a follow-up meeting, one that would see a speech from a resistance member. What they didn’t tell the attendees was that it would also be a secret concert from NIN. Shortly after the concert began, however, it was “raided” by a Swat team and the crowd dispersed back into the LA night.
Whether you’re into the band’s music or not, this whole saga is worth anyone’s respect. Sure, the story itself is pretty pony, tried and tested 1984/The Handmaid’s Tale tropes with a dash of The Matrix added for good measure. The sheer scale of the project, though, combined with the invention of its distribution at the scale that it was performed at, has not been seen since. While that’s understandable (Christ only knows what this all cost), that’s still something of a tragedy.
One hopes that someone takes up the baton that Reznor laid down over a decade and a half ago. We need it now more than ever.
