The 1994 album Trent Reznor felt he had to apologise for: “Sorry, you shouldn’t have let me”
You don’t often see artists try to reel back on what they’ve made. Everyone releases a few outright stinkers in their catalogue, but it’s usually bad PR to badmouth any of your records, especially when fans try to do a deep dive through your body of work. Trent Reznor always told it like it was, though, and he had already reservations about The Downward Spiral before it hit store shelves.
Part of Reznor’s anxiety stemmed from how intensely personal the album felt compared to Nine Inch Nails’ earlier material. Rather than simply sounding aggressive, The Downward Spiral exposed a level of emotional self-destruction that even he seemed uncomfortable revisiting.
Given the audible clubbing that most people got from listening to it, it’s no surprise why some sort of apology would be in order. Reznor was already playing the rock star card off the back of Pretty Hate Machine, but the EP Broken already signalled that we were in for a pretty sudden swerve towards darkness.
While the band’s debut wasn’t necessarily fun in the sun from start to finish, The Downward Spiral cuts to the chase a lot sooner. If we were to use a comparison based on his turn as a film composer, this sounds like the album equivalent of a psychological thriller, telling the story of this awful protagonist trying to sink to the lowest a human being can possibly go.
Once Reznor first handed the album into his label, he was convinced that they would never go for it, telling GQ, “I felt the record was so uncompromising. When I turned it in, I remember saying, ‘Sorry, you shouldn’t have let me do what I wanted to do’. Then, the label heard ‘Closer’ and immediately said, ‘That’s the single’”.
Kudos to the label for finding the one song about sex on the record, but this is one of the least sexy songs ever created this side of ‘Afternoon Delight’. As opposed to sex songs that play it completely straight, this track feels like it’s taking place in the mind of a serial killer, looking to do the most reprehensible things to his victim before he kills them.
Looking at the rest of the record, though, half of the track listing makes ‘Closer’ look like wholesome entertainment. Although there will be the occasional hook that jumps out at you, like the ambience in ‘A Warm Place’ or the piano on ‘March of the Pigs’, the record doesn’t let up in intensity, taking on everything from religion on ‘Heresy’ to the sick nature of humanity on ‘Reptile’.
Just like every psychological thriller, the ending is more than a little bit messed up, too, as Reznor contemplates killing himself in the title track before wondering what he could have done differently on ‘Hurt’. This is the kind of pain that should have turned many people off, but the ugliness was too enticing to look away.
For all of the record’s abrasive moments, The Downward Spiral is still one of the most gripping concept albums of all time, where for a brief second, you get to see inside the mind of Reznor in a way that no one else has before. That raw psychological intensity helped establish The Downward Spiral as one of the defining alternative albums of the decade. It wasn’t simply influential because of its sound, but because it demonstrated how extreme vulnerability could coexist with extreme aggression.
Albums like With Teeth may have seen him go in a more commercial direction later, but it’s no wonder why David Fincher used this music as a template when making the opening credits for Se7en. It’s not pretty by any stretch, and there’s a good chance you might have some scars from it, but the beauty behind the madness is too good to pass up.
