“A fuck up”: The 2005 Nine Inch Nails album Trent Reznor was scared to work on
For the first ten years of their output, Nine Inch Nails appeared to stake new sonic ground with effortless evolution.
A fierce artistry always charged Trent Reznor. From the moment his industrial powerhouse first kicked off in the late 1980s, each Nine Inch Nails album would ensure expectations were keenly defied, from Pretty Hate Machine’s aggro-synthpop, The Downward Spiral’s weathered abrasions, to The Fragile’s aptly brittle and ambient expanses. As the 21st century arrived, it appeared that Reznor was firing on all creative cylinders.
A rut was hit, however. With Reznor’s double-LP opus behind him, a stubborn bout of writer’s block became infused with a gnawing heroin habit, resulting in a 2000 overdose in London and the very question of the band, and even his life, never being so up in the air.
It was clear that if the Nine Inch Nails machine was ever going to regain momentum, practically as well as creatively, a stint in rehab had to be soldiered with the same degree of resolve as his captaincy of the band from Cleveland underground to Woodstock ‘94 show-stealer.
An album wait for fans was nothing new. While doling out a plethora of remix compilations, odd singles for Lost Highway and Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, and the Broken EP, Nine Inch Nails was not a band known for prolificacy, albums typically taking five years to gestate. But their absence felt especially long during the early 2000s’ rapidly shifting rock and pop climate.
Nu-metal had risen and spectacularly fallen, the indie resurgence dominated the day’s MTV2, and his shock rock protégé, Marilyn Manson, was long past his sell-by date. Emerging from the throes of addiction to a new world, Reznor, naturally, was encumbered with more uncertainty than since Nine Inch Nails’ 1988 founding.
“I was a fuck up, and I had fucked a lot of shit up – maybe even my career,” Reznor frankly confessed to Metal Hammer in 2007. “So I approached With Teeth with kid gloves – slightly afraid to touch it at all. I look back now and see things I wouldn’t do again.” Such an ebb in confidence meant a potential for too many cooks spoiling the broth, “I wasn’t in a place to say, ‘thanks, but I disagree.’”
Finally dropped in May 2005, With Teeth managed a sonic marriage of old and new, evoking some of the past flavours of analogue electronic arrest on cuts like ‘Every Day Is Exactly the Same’ and ‘The Line Begins to Blur’, while ‘All the Love in the World’ and ‘Only’ pursued a more digital frisson in their pop hooks. It was a vantage point entry in the Nine Inch Nails oeuvre, taking stock of just how far they’d come, but now looking forward to new artistic ventures with the newfound sobriety pointing the way.
Reznor would never be so busy, dropping two more albums in three years and sparking the fruitful collaboration with future Nine Inch Nails co-member Atticus Ross, charting a new and successful course after facing off with With Teeth’s doubts that nearly struck the industrial juggernaut dead in its tracks.
