“I wish there was a chorus”: The band that frustrates Trent Reznor
Nothing about industrial rock is meant to be the most high-profile pop music known to man. After the original metalheads started to fade from view during their 1990s heyday, hearing bands like Ministry and White Zombie on the rock charts felt like getting run over by heavy machinery over the course of three to four minutes. While Nine Inch Nails did have some tuneful sections behind them, Trent Reznor admitted to having some problems in the genre that he helped popularise.
Because, really, Nine Inch Nails were never supposed to be confined to one genre. Reznor always had a love for synth textures, but he was also more tha happy to shout his praises for other giants in the realm of dark pop, whether that was the deep voice of Dave Gahan in Depeche Mode or every love song that came from Robert Smith’s songbook on every record by The Cure.
That’s not to say that he couldn’t bulldoze across people’s eardrums when he wanted to. The EP Broken will forever be one of the heaviest things to come out of the 1990s, and considering The Downward Spiral was only a little bit further down the timeline, people were more than willing to give Reznor the opportunity to steamroll over their speakers as long as he had the right idea behind him.
The only problem was not every other industrial band was willing to follow suit. Ministry may have had their moments where they could fly off the handle, and Filter managed to take the best of what Nine Inch Nails did and build on it, but looking at the other major acts coming out, like Skinny Puppy, it was like they had taken all of the aggression but none of the songcrafting that Reznor prioritised.
But Skinny Puppy weren’t that kind of band, either. They had their moments where they hook the listener in for a second, but they seemed to look at their music the same way that thrash bands looked at their best material. It was about demolishing everyone first and asking questions later, and while that got them a spot in industrial history, that didn’t mean that Reznor had to like it.
Compared to the other titans of the genre, Reznor thought that Skinny Puppy was leaving a lot on the table if they relied too much on aggression, saying, “I always liked the sound of Skinny Puppy; The frustration with a band like Skinny Puppy for me is that I wish there was a chorus once in a while, and I wish there was something you could hum, something you could come back to.”
Then again, that might be a case of Skinny Puppy not liking what that side of music could entail. After all, having something catchy implies that people are going to want to listen to your music on a grand scale, and since most industrial music was the antithesis of mainstream pop, it was better for them to make something that they could relate to rather than thinking about what the perfect chorus could sound like over their instrumentals.
Reznor might have had his issues with that side of industrial music, but that’s one of the main lessons that every musician has to learn. You’re going to find a lot of colleagues who want to do their best whenever they go into the studio, but it’s not always easy to accept the fact that some of them don’t want to be as big as you want them to be.
