“Maybe I shouldn’t have done that”: Trent Reznor on the album that wants to beat you up
Most people are only coming to an album to be entertained. Even if there are some genres that they like that are heavier than others, it’s worth it to have a song that’s easier to sing along to than something that spends three minutes making as much noise as possible to scare the life out of anyone who listens to it. While Trent Reznor never forgot how to write great hooks, he admitted that one particular album was more concerned with putting the audience into a woodchipper rather than making any mainstream hit.
But listening to where Reznor started with Nine Inch Nails, it wasn’t like he was destined to make the radio-rock tunes that everyone expected to hear. Pretty Hate Machine did have the same synthesisers as other 1980s starlets, but when listening to ‘Terrible Lie’ and ‘Head Like a Hole’, Reznor was looking to purge himself of his demos every time he started singing. Even when writing a song like ‘Something I Can Never Have’, he still felt like he was on the verge of breaking down half the time.
That kind of pressure was all coming from within, though. Reznor had never been in the most stable frame of mind during the first half of his career, but whereas fame managed to solve a few of his problems, it seemed like more popped up in their places, leaving him even more lonely than he was before.
If he couldn’t let out his anger in public, he was going to document his pain on record, and most people never forgot it on The Downward Spiral. Depicting the life of a drug-addled sociopath looking to tear through everything he sees, half of the album is a frightening listen, from the massive teeth behind ‘March of the Pigs’ or hearing him make music out of machine-like grunts on tracks like ‘Eraser’.
While this is the last album that anyone would want to throw on at a party, that was precisely the point. Reznor envisioned the record as being something that washed over someone like he experienced listening to Pink Floyd’s The Wall back in the day, but even he had to admit that the album was a little bit more abrasive than he anticipated.
Despite having that little bit of hope at the end of the album with ‘Hurt’, Reznor said the only reason it worked is coming after the musical carnage that came before, saying, “The Downward Spiral album was a record all about beating everybody up – and then ‘Hurt’ was like a coda saying maybe I shouldn’t have done that. But to make the song sound impenetrable because I thought it was a little too vulnerable, I tried to layer it in noise.”
Granted, ‘Hurt’ is the whole reason why the album still holds its power. If the album ended on the title track with the protagonist taking his own life, it would have been far more nihilistic than it already is, so leaving off with a song about remorse and trying to write his wrongs is a far better perspective to look at the world through.
So, really, The Downward Spiral is an album about perseverance if you think about it. It’s about as messy and violent as a BDSM dungeon, but the minute that people hear everything wrap up, they get to see the shape of Reznor’s heart is a lot bigger than they probably realised.
