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The Way Out Is Through: Nine Inch Nails’ ‘Hesitation Marks’ at 10

Nine Inch Nails’ Hesitation Marks creates an objective point for looking back with wiser eyes, showing that the way to a better life is to push through the past.

After years of deepening addiction and struggles with mental health, Hesitation Marks would see Trent Reznor push back against the straight rock-star narrative of success, addiction, and the inevitable ‘comeback’. A record of ruthless self-examination, Hesitation Marks redefines the ideal of recovery as a final goal of enlightenment, realizing it more as a fraught and fractured ongoing, never final process. Released in 2013, it would be the first new Nine Inch Nails album in five years since 2008’s The Slip, a ‘road’ record that sought to capture the immediacy of live first-time takes in place of agonized repetition and layered overdubs. 

Hesitation Marks is a poised and nuanced record, standing out among Reznor’s late-career peers from ’90s alternative rock, who would more commonly make desperate grabs for past glories rather than try to experiment or reinvent their sound. It was here Reznor would expose himself under brutal self-scrutiny, trying to rid himself of the pain of being an artist in a mainstream-dominated music industry that increasingly prioritized professionalism over risk-taking. Moving beyond the emotional extremes and intense drive for creative authenticity that came to signify the aesthetic of a definitive Nine Inch Nails sound, Reznor left behind the previously teenage affectations of his earlier songs and arrived at a more renewed lyrical sincerity, purposefully working through his most difficult growing pains and pointed mistakes of young adulthood, haunted by painful remembrance.

 By 2013, Reznor was happy to shed much of the rock star persona and the alienated aesthetic that threatened to consume his real self and trap him behind a determined, marble-like pose of unchanging, youthful nihilism, a shadow figure who lacked enough experience to understand what a mature adult life could be. A determined confidence, albeit with brittle armor, brought Reznor to the fore of public consciousness as an archetype and surrendered to a monotone form of expression. Hesitation Marks affirms a conscious and open acknowledgment of regret rather than seeking to suppress or erase the difficulty of its expanded confession. Instead of inviting forgetting and erasure, Reznor’s creative recovery became an act of accommodating the past into his present self; Hesitation Marks expresses this confrontation with addiction and life post-addiction. 

Reznor presents Nine Inch Nails albums as ongoing projects of experimentation, phasing in and out of metal, synthpop, and electronic influences while trying to maintain a singular musical identity. Hesitation Marks finds Reznor revisiting the mindscape of his 1994 album, The Downward Spiral , which still stands as Nine Inch Nails’ most extreme artistic statement while overlapping with mainstream levels of sales and media exposure. Hesitation Marks would absorb The Downward Spiral ‘s musical and lyrical DNA , deconstructing its musical world as raw source material in Reznor’s creative narrative as he wrestles with intimate confessional and forceful distancing as a form of self-preservation.

Announcing Hesitation Marks in May 2013, a few months before its August release, Reznor had nothing to prove to himself or his fanbase, but he did admit to a hard-fought and determined recording process: “For the last year, I’ve been secretly working non-stop with Atticus Ross and Alan Moulder […] I am happy to say [it] is finished and frankly fucking great.” Sinking back into the five-year cycle of incubation and production that realized The Fragile (1999) and With Teeth (2005), speaking from a mature position to examine the personal struggles that underscored the previous 20 years. 

From the start of his career, Reznor found that he was increasingly crippled by his own perfectionism, later describing his earlier work ethic as being “at war with myself”. Captive to the dizzying void of the blank page, acting in sheer desperation to perfectly realize the imperfect idea, he would try to make every song the best thing he did, always better than the last. His trademark behavior was to try too hard, pushing himself beyond instinct towards narrowing creative exhaustion, where eventually fierce exactitude sunk into procrastination as he struggled to finish a complete song, never allowing himself the satisfaction of knowing when a track was finished. 

By 2013, Reznor rejected the idea that worthwhile creative endeavors can only be achieved by significant personal risk; the psychological pain and physical abuse brought about as endurance of growing mental strain. Following a continued descent into drug and alcohol abuse that started around 1993, addictive self-medicating behaviors dominated Reznor’s young life. Suppressing anxiety and numbing his internal sense of pressure, his addictions culminated in an overdose while on tour in 2000, where Reznor snorted heroin, mistaking it for cocaine, narrowly avoiding death.

He arrived at the nadir of his drug abuse, sometimes referred to in addiction recovery as bottoming out; it forced Reznor to acknowledge that he had a problem. It also made him understand that addiction was neither the entire cause nor the cure of making music but a symptom of deeper issues, chiefly the real feelings of depression and self-loathing that fuelled The Downward Spiral and the continued unsettled angst that dominated its equally tortured follow-up album, The Fragile , both records that, for all of their cathartic power, indulged negative feelings they were meant to exorcize. 

Drowning out painful emotions in volume and aggression was only ever a short-term fix— a criticism that could be leveled at the Fragile— a double album that veered between monolithic layers of distorted, alt-rock guitars and deeply introspective laments verging on self-pity and an emotional nostalgia, typical of heavier guitar music towards the late 1990s. At times, the record becomes claustrophobically parasitic, mirroring the struggles of emotionally vulnerable listeners, from teenagers to adults. It feeds upon and reinforces the sentiments of people emotionally dissociated from mainstream culture, providing them with both cathartic release and emotional centering that allows for psychological struggle while occasionally confirming these extreme states as the natural and unassailable order of life.

Reznor, then 34, seemed to indulge extended adolescence in his lyric writing. He consolidated his life into measures of ‘pain’ without further articulating why such feelings might dominate his emotional landscape. In the five years of working on and off in the studio, he struggled equally with the death of his grandmother and persistent writer’s block, particularly in a period of forced isolation in the California coastline of Big Sur, an abortive songwriting expedition that would inspire the writing of “La Mer” ( The Fragile ).

Living through the conjoined fallout of those seminal Nine Inch Nails albums, Reznor was emotionally hung up on the past, keeping one eye looking backward while seeing the future recede before him. His forced period of recovery brought him to the surrogate addiction of becoming a fervent gym-bro, a long process that resulted in the 2005 ‘comeback’ album With Teeth . The record’s guitar-driven style is almost derivative of the alternative band sound Reznor was seeking to reassert his position in the world of alternative rock that, in many respects, had already moved on past nu-metal towards the more expansive world of emo.

With Teeth nonetheless resurrected his confidence in making music and helped him to rediscover with an audience who still wanted to hear a new Nine Inch Nails album. Several albums, tours, and an original soundtrack Oscar later, by the time of Hesitation Marks ‘ release, there was nothing left for Reznor to prove. He chose to go deeper into himself without getting stuck in narrow introspection. Hesitation Marks affirms itself as musically broad and adventurous while isolating Reznor’s core situation of trying to realize a new future and stay the course amid the wreckage of a troubled and difficult past life. 

A more mature and thoughtful Trent Reznor allowed his creative work to be equally playful and serious, acknowledging that the recording process demanded mistakes and happy accidents to discover and realize new sounds. He was now more open to a freer way of making music, content to throw away tracks that weren’t working rather than forcing a song through to completion and beating himself up in the process. Reznor found himself to be a more confident and experienced self-editor, able to side-step the judgemental and punishing wrath of his internal critic to craft a more dynamic range of music that didn’t have to be heavy for its own sake or seek to please the needs of the imagined listener.

Where earlier Nine Inch Nails albums became absorbed into Dante-like visitations to an inferno of fraught emotions, writhing and vibing in the abyss, Hesitation Marks becomes an objective point of looking back with wiser eyes, expressing that the way to a better life in the present is to push through the past. In doing so, Reznor rejected the notion that past traumas can somehow be overcome, or even neutralized, through creative catharsis. Real trauma lies hidden far beneath the surface and never really goes away. Reznor revisited his struggles and interrogated them head-on, with a constant awareness of the past. To move forward, it must be accommodated into his present, emergent self, never entirely settled, never cured, but always working toward a new becoming. 

Hesitation Marks began life as recording sessions for bonus tracks to be tacked on to a forthcoming Nine Inch Nails ‘Greatest Hits’ compilation, work that would later appear as the songs “Everything” and “Satellite”. With the ‘best-of’ situation edging a little too close to Throbbing Gristle’s parodically-titled 20 Jazz Funk Greats , the mooted collection has (thankfully) never appeared. As he had from the start of his career with the debut album Pretty Hate Machine [1989] and the surprise success of The Downward Spiral , Reznor pushed back against industry expectations of creating new music as filler: “Rather than piss these [songs] away on a greatest-hits record which nobody cares about, including me, why don’t we see if there’s an album in there?'”

Instead, Hesitation Marks would become an affirmation of Reznor’s 25 years as a studio auteur. In real terms, it took Reznor more than a year-and-a-half of writing and recording. Beginning from his usual approach of establishing small strategies and limiting parameters to shape his process, Reznor worked alone at first to explore rhythms and sonic textures. As with the 2007 album Year Zero , which was pieced together on a laptop in the back of a tour bus alongside Atticus Ross, Reznor crafted minimalist arrangements using drum machines and pads – holding off from the more expansive instrumentation of guitars, synth, and piano, a process he described as “feeling around in the dark to see what feels inspiring”. 

Disengaging himself from chord-driven song structures, Reznor was led primarily by rhythm, granting the new music a more immediately danceable edge, from which natural song patterns slowly emerged. Hesitation Marks hints at a mainstream compromise where by either cultural osmosis or conscious effort, Reznor reflected the shiny, slick aesthetic of early ’10s pop music while carrying echoes of 1994’s more groove-driven tracks such as “Heresy” and “Closer”. The earworm melody of Hesitation Marks’ “Satellite”, for example, would not have been out of place on Britney Spears’ 2007 album Blackout and its moody electronics. Elsewhere, Reznor jumps back to the sonic onslaught of fierce guitars, used to shatter the build-up of tracks like “In Two”, suggesting that he is unwilling to lose the necessary tension of discordant melodies and outright aggression that helped to establish Nine Inch Nails as a versatile musical force.

In 2012, Reznor explained to the Quietus how recording The Social Network soundtrack under the gaze of director David Fincher and the film studio demanded that he step down from his usual position of self-centered control: “That’s very different from how Nine Inch Nails operates, where at the end of the day I’m making all the decisions, and in that pyramid of power I’m sitting at the top of that, vision-wise, direction-wise, final vote-wise. I found that I really enjoyed being in that respectful environment, not being at the top of the pyramid.”

The “In Conversation…” interview, released as part of the Hesitation Marks bonus album package, has Reznor speaking into a voice recorder, just as he would take notes of musical ideas. This solo interview becomes more of a creative self-analysis session where Reznor explains that in freeing himself from the obligation of delivering a timely, follow-up record to The Slip , he attempted to break away from typical Nine Inch Nails signature sounds and ingrained studio processes. Still, Hesitation Marks displays the same alienated electronics, musique concrete , and agitated synthpop that makes Reznor’s music stand out. He mentions using some of the (now retro) synths from Pretty Hate Machine , an admission towards musical self-reference and an earnest feint toward nostalgia. 

Hesitation Marks is a continuation of the ghost in the machine aura that runs through Nine Inch Nails’ music, shifting from early experiments of tape manipulation to make delay loops and altering the speed of recordings, now evolving towards developments in laptop-based sound-building and production software. It is light years beyond Reznor’s teenage musical set-up: “My arsenal of sound-making tools had been a Wurlitzer piano that my dad got me. It was a cool instrument on its own, and with a couple of effects pedals, I could put distortion on it. It sounded like a Van Halen track if you played it the right way.”

Reznor fleshed out his densely-layered demos, skeletal pieces of dark hip-hop, and abstract melodies – the heartbeat of a song – in an upgraded studio space alongside Atticus Ross, with Reznor later bringing in trusted producer Alan Moulder and several guest musicians. Working with quiet determination, Hesitation Marks reveals itself to be one of Reznor’s most considered and personal albums, reflecting his new perspective on his life in music. Spare piano keys trigger sequencer chord progressions that unfurle into bigger, monstrous sounds that bloom into richly textured, expansive tracks. This album is a marked step beyond the over-ambitious and sometimes samey double-album sprawl of The Fragile ’s ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ sides and the driven narrative self-abasement of The Downward Spiral . Reznor’s most disciplined, assured method of working would shape the tone of Hesitation Marks heavy atmospheres, at once brittle and propulsive, a style that would also be present throughout Reznor and Ross’ soundtrack work, particularly in the 2016 film Patriot’s Day .

Hesitation Marks ‘ title signifies Reznor’s shift from submerged, private pain to a long wished-for catharsis that seems just out of reach. A clinical term applied in mental health contexts, ‘hesitation marks’ refers to the sharp-force trauma of small cuts that show a reluctance to commit to deeper incisions, expressing moments of pause, the mark of a second thought before completion of the suicidal act. “They are generally found on the wrists and the neck and tend to be found in multiples, of variable depth and parallel to the deepest cut.” That Reznor would break into the psychological language to frame the spirit of the album reflects the destructive situations he passed through —to death and back— a deeper hurt you carry with you. 

In “Came Back Haunted”, Reznor resurrects his ghost memories of life on the edge. He sings of visiting “the other side”, the blurred lines of his near-death caused by an accidental overdose in 2000, a traumatic experience that stands alongside the suicidal ideation Reznor refers to so much in his earlier songs. If there was any true state of recovery to be achieved through making music, it remained an ongoing process to be lived within, a life’s work. From the perspective of any self-acknowledged addict, recovery is more a condition of being, not an illness to be finally cured or overcome. As stated by David Bowie in a 1999 BBC interview, he would forever be an addict and live accordingly. When asked about the depth of his sobriety, Bowie stated unequivocally that to go back to alcohol, let alone drugs, would cause him to lose his family and eventually his life, a price he was unwilling to pay.

Maintaining his own balancing act of occasional Alcoholics Anonymous support groups since the early 1990s, it was on Bowie’s 1995 collaborative tour with Nine Inch Nails promoting the 1. Outside and The Downward Spiral albums, respectively, when Bowie tried to encourage Reznor not to let addiction overwhelm his creative life, that the rewards of making music that he was so passionate about were still possible without needing to rely on a derangement of the senses to fuel inspiration. Though Bowie’s warning would not be enough to steer Reznor away from substance abuse until he reached his own private nadir a few years later, he would later reflect upon sobriety as a valuable and necessarily guarded state of being where, in spite of their resolve, the addict is always vulnerable to relapse on the turn of one bad decision. 

If Reznor’s return to the public eye of the music world in 2005 was not as a conventionally new or better person, he certainly seemed ‘fitter and happier’. Only on Hesitation Marks , eight years down the line, did he fully expose the fractured and incomplete narrative of the straight recovery journey. It was a dark time that Reznor managed to walk away from. Creatively, it remained an open wound of deeper issues he put off in favor of getting clean and healthy and keeping busy with other projects. With the 2000 Kid A album, Radiohead ’s Thom Yorke revealed how much he had internalized the 20th-century breakdown neurosis at the heart of 1997’s OK Computer . Much like that album’s symptomatic opening track, “Airbag” speaks to Reznor’s own “Mr Self Destruct”. Hesitation Marks carries the weight of the survivor ecstatically shocked back into life: I’m still here, still alive – now what? 

Russell Mills ’ mixed-media cover artwork(s) offers a palimpsest vision of Reznor’s scattered reflections. Issued in four different versions (to meet the album’s multiple format release) variously titled “Turn and Burn”, “Time and Again”, “Cargo in the Blood”, and “Other Murmurs”, Mills said: “I’ve tried to make works that obliquely allude to the essence of the subject matter, to its emotional core. I hope that they will invite multiple readings.” A return to the artist and musician’s shared interest in fragile objects confronted with destructive materials, the works resemble a horrific tableau scraped from the mindscape of David Fincher’s Se7en. The canvases show burnt matches carefully placed along deeply scarred wood; smooth velvet is peppered with powdered rust, and tangles of wire and broken moth wings criss-cross divided space. The underlying tensions of the music combine with the terrible beauty of Mills’ work, speaking to a deeper resilience, hard-won and hard-worn, a continued vulnerability that admits to damage and decay as signs of life.

For Hesitation Marks , Mills created vistas of suffering as a necessary experience for growth, expressing the contradiction of pain and triumph in surviving a personal disaster. In 2013, Mills explained to Fader magazine his view of the album as a metaphorical record of accumulated trauma: “You have an air crash, and you have this black box which is a data recorder, and it documents all the factual evidence: cold, analytical, scientific information. And yet you still have this wreckage, which you can’t get your head around. Beyond that physical wreckage, there’s another layer of damage, which is damage caused to people who are related to, or love, the people who were affected by this plane crash. I was talking about this as a kind of analogy for what he’d been through [Reznor], for what I’d been through, and also, hopefully, on a more universal level.”

The imagery Mills created highlights the pained trials of second-guessing hope with only rare moments of affirmation to keep you going. As mistakes of the past cycle back around to catch up with you, we find Reznor trying to escape this same loop of denial and self-doubt that kept him repeating the same patterns of negative behavior. Reznor’s concerns echo Bowie in the darkest period of his mid-1970s cocaine addiction; the 1977 track “Always Crashing in the Same Car”, shows traveling in a vehicle with no steering wheel; the driverless victim becomes a voyeur watching their life happen to them. Speaking of the blurred passage of time under addiction, Reznor said: “You tend to accumulate dramatic bad things when you’re in that place. My house got broken into; how did that happen to me? Oh, my car got stolen, oh I woke up in hospital … it doesn’t sound that out of the ordinary when everything is shitty.”

Dredging up raw material for the album, Reznor forced himself to confront these scenarios with the power of hindsight. Adopting a similarly forensic eye as Mills, it was only years after he lived through their consequences that he could see things clearly, with each fresh mistake gathering into a new blow upon a bruise, though not without some distancing from the person he was – as if it happened to someone else. [The phrase, “a blow upon a bruise”, appears in Evelyn Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited , which reflects upon a disintegrating friendship between Charles Ryder and his alcoholic friend Sebastian Flyte, who seems destined to pursue a spiral of continued dissipation, unable to stop himself.]

By 2013, Reznor was living in a sober, secure, and happy family environment for many years. However, the album shows that he never fully escaped the shadow of the increasingly alienated and tortured figure of the 1990s. Speaking to NPR in 2013, Reznor said: “I’ve kind of watched with amusement as the press has latched on to ‘Reznor, now 48, happily married with two kids and an Oscar winner,’ as if I can be summed up as that now.” The truth is always more complex and harder to explain. Hesitation Marks is an attempt to touch upon Reznor’s collected fears and haunting anxieties, a distant ticking pulse that never went away.  

As with many artists of the late 1990s, when alternative rock became part of the mainstream grammar of popular music, with a focus on heavy music video rotation on MTV, Reznor awoke one day to find Nine Inch Nails a million-selling, popular rock band, following Woodstock 1994 they became a household name for alternative music. The need to make personally satisfying music, along with continued pressure to maintain critical and commercial success, compounded self-inflicted wounds and internal struggles: “Downward Spiral felt like I had an unending bottomless pit of rage and self-loathing inside me, and I had to somehow challenge something, or I’d explode.”

He became increasingly reliant on drug and alcohol abuse as a coping mechanism, enduring a difficult balance between constant work and the need for collapse, insulating him from the steadily encroaching hyper-reality of the media world. The expanding schedule of the Fragility Tour through 1999 saw Reznor hit peak hype in the MTV-curated popular consciousness. burnt-out by exhaustion, he experienced a near-fatal overdose in 2000: “For me, it was another brick in the wall of realizing, at some point, enough.” In the aftermath of The Fragile and into the clean era of With Teeth , Reznor sought to put a chain on the more straightforward throttled power chords that formed the backbone of those records but also became their stylistic curse.

Since The Downward Spiral , Reznor has crafted additional layers of sound into his music, with each song becoming another aspect of the album’s cohesive whole. This encouraged the listener to consider how the songs reflected one another across a record’s sequencing and to discover new sonic resonances between tracks. Hesitation Marks is made for headphones and would be released in both standard and ‘audiophile’ versions, aimed at giving people with the right sound set-up a richer experience:  “I still try to make music that takes a number of listens to comprehend and can reveal things after 50 listens.”

Reznor was pushing for the patient listener, willing to invest time to appreciate the album fully. In his solo interview, Reznor referred to the ongoing ‘loudness wars’, a production trend begun in the late 1990s and early 2000s, to push the force of volume over nuance and space between instruments. Where in the past, overkill could seem to contain or subvert Reznor’s deeper troubles, these issues would gradually rise up like rocks, revealed after the waves passed. Reznor saw the compromise with technology as a struggle to claw back the finer art of music production as engineering from the high compression rates of the late 1990s ‘loudness wars’: “The compromise that happens when you make things louder and louder is, you lose the dynamic range. The fidelity suffers, but the hype goes up.”

Between the Grooves of Hesitation Marks

This dedication to visceral sound quality is present in Hesitation Marks ‘ opener, “The Eater of Dreams”, full of glitches, dissonant, and corrosive static. Hungry, distorted voices call out from the black noise of a buried nightmare, and we are drawn into a collection of songs as a subterranean world. Speaking in a 2013 interview, Reznor said: “I don’t think it’s a gentle record. I do think it’s more subversive in how it gets you. It’s not about everything being at 11 and the pyrotechnics of sound and scare tactics, which I’ve definitely used in the past. But it doesn’t feel like the middle-aged, ‘I’ve-given- up’ record either.” 

Reznor would make more specific references to his era of excess. The mid-album deep cut “All Time Low” takes a caustic swipe at the routine chaos of addiction and uses the suffocating atmosphere of the party and the after-party in both the lyrics and the track’s sonic style. Muddied, thudding sounds offer the second-hand claustrophobia of the dancefloor, its muffled heartbeat breaking through the wall and into a closed-off mind, trying to get away from itself. Rich with the tightly wound paranoia of hiding out in private VIP areas and dingy backrooms, the track is haunted by the struggle to maintain a high in a suddenly shrinking space filling up with hangers-on and blinkered, moody lighting. What starts out as the shared act of careless talk losing its focus, cutting and re-cutting lines, getting lost in the new love of false confidence and fresh inspiration, sinks into a darker reality of individuals separated and closed-off in their own high, sinking into private distances.

Later, this is reduced to taking enough drugs, alone and with increasing secrecy, cursing and protecting our own very private problem just to feel OK, telling ourselves it will be alright, it’s all just for fun, just this once, then things will be different, then the next and the next time it gets pushed further back, hiding behind the belief that you can always take it or leave it. “Shut–the–God-damn–door,” Reznor cries out in a sharpened falsetto. It is always the same voice creeping into your thoughts, the familiar ache of repetition, calling for a little bit more, which never seems quite enough until suddenly you realize you’ve had too much for too long and quitting of your own free will is no longer the option you once thought it was. 

Reznor’s call for closure and isolation doubles as one of the album’s many cries for help, another warning. This could be Reznor in the present slamming the door on a difficult chapter of his life, overwhelmed by difficult thoughts, or fighting to keep out demons that have already been internalized, as he is relegated to a bit-part in his own story. The track’s title also offers a marked reference to Reznor’s gateway David Bowie album, Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps) , where he replicates speak-singing-shouting, cadence falling-off at the end of the chorus in “Ashes to Ashes” – “We know Major Tom’s a junkie/Hitting an all-time low”. Each word is a stab to the heart.   

“All Time Low” surges with a fierce groove that continues the warped disco of 1994’s “Heresy”, both drawing on the lineage of Bowie’s embittered 1975 hit “Fame”. Reznor continues his rhythmic stilted yells into the void: “Every–thing–is–not–o–kay”. Reviving the confessions of The Downward Spiral , but this time he stands astride the abyss and mocking his own shadow, twisted by thwarted, self-torturing ambition. With the line “You’ve barely even scratched the skin,” Reznor vocalizes the album title, a wound that fails to reach the depths of his emotional pain. The lyric doubles as a reflection on his troubling commitment to music above life, looking back to a time when bleeding for his art seemed all too necessary to try and realize his personal expectations. In live shows for the 2013 Tension Tour, Reznor sometimes switched lyrics from “Closer” over the outro of “All Time Low”, further teasing the overlapping DNA between the two records arriving from different ends of his biography.

Elsewhere, Reznor would repeat his open-ended recording approach from The Downward Spiral, grabbing instrumental snatches of music from legendary guest players. Guitarist Adrian Belew would return, alongside Fleetwood Mac guitarist Lindsey Buckingham and the bassist Pino Palladino, as with David Bowie and Brian Eno’s experiments of free-playing in the studio, Reznor would drop the musicians into a track for four bars and later edit in their parts to the song, enmeshing them in the layering of sound as to be indistinguishable from the whole. Buckingham and Palladino form their own intertwined rhythms that give “All Time Low” its needling slink and bounce, at once dynamic and atmospheric, which Reznor refers to as both “collaboration and transformation”. It is interesting to note the song’s connection to draft lyrics and instrumental sections that informed The Fragile B-side/outtake “Ten Miles High”, later released on the the expanded Deviations version of the album.

“Copy of A” stands as one of Reznor’s most confessional songs. Nailing the repetitive nature of the recording and touring artist, he highlights the cumulative pressures of making new music as a product while being encouraged to book and extend live tours to meet both public demand and the financial expectations of the record label: “I am just a copy of a copy of a copy/Everything I say has come before”. Sucked into a cyclical system, these lines reflect the real-world tensions Reznor has hitched himself to as a professional musician. The initial thrill of seeing the ghost of an idea become music is swallowed up (by the “Eater of Dreams”?) to become another process within the record industry mill.

Trying to stay true to some musical identity without churning out the same albums, haunted by legacy and the weight of a band’s back catalog. The “Copy of A” phrase is perhaps absorbed from Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Fight Club , taken further in the movie adaptation, directed by David Fincher, where the mass cycle of production and consumption has people displacing their true selves and the idea of an authentic life, into the existence of the consumer; under the guise of living well, artifice replaces art.

Reznor makes the song’s form literal, repeating phrases which later become the word ‘echo’ rebounding through a hollow corridor, Reznor meeting his voice returned back to him. It also becomes a statement hinting (again) towards Nietzsche’s idea of the Eternal Recurrence, a further connection with The Downward Spiral . Where Nietzsche’s theory appears doom-laden, at its core, it remains aspirational; we should live fully in such a way that we embrace and are present in every moment as if we might one day have to relive the same life; every decision, every accomplishment, and every mistake; bound to repeat ourselves. In this spirit, we should strive to make the best, most life-affirming choices.

This idea also speaks to the inevitable patterns of addiction: excess, trying to kick, getting clean, and relapse, but it is also a warning against settling for the mundanity of mere existence as a cycle of sleep/eat/fuck repeat. Reznor states this literally in the lyrics to “I Would for You”: “All this has happened all before / And this will happen all again.” Love, like art, rescues and elevates us above the functional sides of life bound to endless time and beyond. The desire for self-transformation, admitting to the pressure to be a ‘better person’ meets the crushing bulwark of frustration on “In Two”, a robotic voice chants back at Reznor about the inevitable violence of brute nature that seeks to bend us back towards the human animal as the divided self that is satisfied in ignorance and abasement, but never truly happy, always lurking under the surface, which still threatens to capsize his life at the most vulnerable and ecstatic moments. 

Shifting gears from its earlier skittish tension, the final third of “Copy of A” shadows the techno-driven backlash in the chorus of 1994’s “Ruiner”, the fallout of a shattered image only realized in a collapsing mirror. Cut-through with warring voices, Reznor is forced into a confrontation with his hollow persona as it threatens to overwhelm him. This is Reznor acknowledging that he is not always so different from his pop peers; he finds himself marched toward the promise of creative freedom that quickly narrows into the cornered idea of Nine Inch Nails (as burning cattle iron ‘NIN’ logo) where success can easily push the artist towards repetition. Once again, Hesitation Marks is defined by Reznor’s aversion to satisfying others and pleasing himself artistically, working against the grain to reinvent himself and, in doing so, overcoming the weight of his back catalog [NPR 2013]. 

Reznor’s struggle with history continues on “Came Back Haunted”, the second single from Hesitation Marks accompanied by a music video shot by David Lynch. The track is punctuated by synth voices and a persistent bass throb, a constant pulse that becomes the rhythmic tongue running up and down the spine of the song, always trailing behind it Reznor’s need for escape. The stuttered lyrics are cut into elliptical call-and-response fragments. Fractured goodbyes answered with an urgent ‘hello’, an errant spirit that remains both present and absent. So much of Reznor’s vocals on Hesitation Marks are percussive, more instrumental than emotive, pushing for aural impact rather than surface grammar. On “Came Back Haunted”, we hear him banging his head against the wall of his mind, caged by blame-filled overthinking that he “just can’t stop”. The song ends with that closing word, cutting the music dead. 

Reznor’s call for silence expresses the desperate need for mental quiet, reaching back into the lyrical DNA of The Downward Spiral , where Reznor would first mention the line “nothing can stop me now” in the second track from The Downward Spiral “Piggy” and the return to it in the songs “Ruiner” and “Big Man With a Gun” – becoming a megalomaniac mantra of the album’s reactivity between poles of god-like ego and overwhelming self-loathing. The theme of putting the brakes on a runaway life would recur in “Into The Void” from The Fragile (1999), where Reznor sings: “trying to save myself / But myself keeps slipping away.”

We find Reznor, watching himself, again looking back to the person he was in 1994, a doppelganger who he can never fully turn his back on; both of them are trapped in the same echo chamber, doomed to live through one another’s reflection. Speaking to the Guardian in 2013, Reznor said: “This record was written as the other side of that journey. The despair and loneliness and rage and isolation and the not-fitting-in aspect that still is in me, but I can express that in a way that feels more appropriate to who I am now.”

A more seductive, bittersweet track, “Find My Way”, returns to the grounded struggle of self-overcoming, replacing ego with the admission of true vulnerability. Looking forward, in the shadow of the past, toward some kind of better future he cannot imagine, Reznor hints at the challenge of following a twisted path towards contentment, or at least a place of safety. Reznor’s earnest croon smoothes out the fraught and jagged edges of earlier tracks as a gently clipped beat and trickling piano suggest a near-ballad that lives as an open-hearted hymn to inertia and confusion. The song’s leading line suggests that difficult point where travel meets with distance to become a kind of inner stasis, a relentless motion that goes nowhere. Reznor yearns for a retreat from the infinite cycle of touring, being eaten up by the endless passage of miles in a great loop only to arrive back where he started, a home life that has continued without him and, for that short while, seems to have forgotten him.

Though family life would always be rewarding and serve as a grounding foundation to reality, Reznor argued that touring inevitably forced him to miss out on key moments of his children’s lives, the act of their growing up, without him, such that bringing his family on tour with him became a concession of surviving the process. In the outro to “Find My Way”, Reznor and Ross layer on thickening distortion and looped chants met with saxophone calls; Reznor’s plaintive vocal sinks into deeper isolation, a man always smothered by the next horizon.

Despite the poppy, seemingly upbeat affirmation of “Everything”, the song continues in the vein of a bittersweet survivor’s song. For an album that eschews outright heaviness in favour of rigor and restraint, the song remains undercut by deeper, conflicted tensions of hope and regret, like “All Time Low”, we find Reznor caught between the eliding past and some impossible future. A shorter, snappier song just scratching over the three-minute mark, its optimism is marred by harsh realism where Reznor has already “lost so much along the way”. The sheer pace of the song finds him desperately making up for lost time. Even where the chorus layers on the flood of mental traffic, New Order-style guitar chords, soaring synths, and bounding-reverb vocals zipping past, the pure drive of self-discovery ends in a lack of resolution, sucked down into a black hole of static.

Reznor points to being overshadowed by the absolutist metaphor of his own excesses: creative ambition, drug addiction, sexual fascination, depression, and self-loathing, trapped in a narrowing tunnel of thought, where mental illness clouds our perceptions to the point that our reality becomes distorted by self-mythologizing. A hymn to introverted megalomania, the “everything” in Reznor’s life almost killed him. This internal conflict stems from a warped root manifest in 1994’s “The Becoming”, after which Reznor jumps forwards to “I Do Not Want This”, where he rants into the microphone:  “I want to do everything”, compounded by the need to do “something that matters”, a self-lacerating vision that “Find My Way” suggests might have finally been fulfilled, “I have been to every place” a slow-burn realization tainted with melancholy. 

Other tracks emphasize the further sifting of layers; “Various Methods of Escape” and “Running” bear the hallmarks of Thom Yorke’s first solo album, 2007’s The Eraser , particularly in the chanted, breathless phrasing where Reznor gets caught up in repetition as words begin to shed their meaning. Elsewhere “I Would For You” offers a rare admission of romantic life outside of Hesitation Marks claustrophobic intensity. Reznor finds himself wanting to invite a widescreen chorus to ease the album away from sinking cynicism while also marking what is most important to him. 

Hesitation Marks derails the straight-line narrative from success to excess. Reznor reflects upon his deeper struggles with depression, self-loathing, and grief. While he sets himself firmly in the present tense, the album views the past at a distance while admitting that our personal history remains an open wound, revealing a more complex intermingling of experience and deeper cumulative trauma, a shadow-self that never leaves you. The outro of the album’s last song, “While I’m Still Here”, is again punctuated by guitar licks and bass flourishes from Reznor’s session players. It edges into a final hint of menace with “Black Noise”, heaping on cavernous echoes, a final reminder that the dark times are never far away.

Realizing a broad and enervating sonic palette, Hesitation Marks revealed new territory for Nine Inch Nails. Writing in The Guardian in 2013, Ben Beaumont-Thomas views the record as “an industrial cousin to Radiohead’s In Rainbows that flips between glowering glitchtronica and whoomp-laden rock”. Speaking in his 2013 “In Conversation…” interview, Reznor would be at pains to mark the connection between Hesitation Marks and The Downward Spiral , collaborating with Alan Moulder, down to the album artwork and font choices, by implication, forming a loose trilogy with The Fragile . 

Now a decade old, Hesitation Marks enjoys a slow-burn reappraisal from committed Nine Inch Nails fans. Easily overlooked for its lack of guitar-heaviness and lack of ‘hits’, it offers a dark heart with a slick electronics sheen. It endures as a singular Nine Inch Nails record of consistent quality and accessibility. Looking over recent Reddit discussions, it is heartening to see so many newer (younger) listeners approach the album with fresh ears while longer-haul fans are encouraged to give the record another chance and are often rewarded for their patience. Reznor would reflect that, along with Atticus Ross and Alan Moulder, he was further changed by a sometimes difficult and challenging recording process; the trio emerged closer than ever, producing a unique record that altered how people would see the entire Nine Inch Nails discography — and Trent Reznor as an artist.

This article is dedicated to mistercakelul.

Works Cited

Alan, Marc, Earl, Steven, and Monroe, Eric. “ Hesitation Marks “. Pod Like a Hole . 4 February 2019.

Beaumont, Mark. “ The Nine Lives of Trent Reznor “ . The Guardian . 8 August 2013.

Cardwell, Tyler and Matthews, Brian. “ Chapter 9: Hesitation Marks “. The Discographers podcast . 3 October, 2018.

Kranioti EF, Kastanaki AE, Nathena D, Papadomanolakis A. “Suicidal self-stabbing: A report of 12 cases from Crete, Greece” . Medicine, Science and the Law . 2017;57(3):124-129. doi:10.1177/0025802417712179

Nosnitsky, Andrew. “I Survived Everything: An Interview with Trent Reznor “. The Fader . 24 September 2013.

Trent Reznor: “ I’m Not The Same Person I Was 20 Years Ago “. All Things Considered. NPR .. 4 September 2013.

Raggett, Ned. “On the Wing: Trent Reznor on Creativity and How to Destroy Angels “. The Quietus . 10 December 2012.

Reznor, Trent. “ Trent Reznor, Conversation With… “. YouTube. 2013.

Ryder, Caroline. “ Trent Reznor Q&A “. Dazed Digital. 4 September, 2013.

Zelenko,  Michael and Zeichner, Naomi. “We’re in This Together: An Oral History of Nine Inch Nails “. Fader . 23 September 2013

• Brace Yourself for Nine Inch Nails' 'Hesitation Marks'
• A Minute to Breathe: Interview With Nine Inch Nails' Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross
• The 20 Best Nine Inch Nails Songs
• Counterbalance: Nine Inch Nails - 'The Downward Spiral'
• Nine Inch Nails' Experiment: A Bigger Bang than Radiohead?
• Between the Grooves: Nine Inch Nails – 'Broken'
• Nine Inch Nails: Official Site
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Nine Inch Nails Set Up ‘Hesitation Marks’ With New Single, Tour Dates

The industrial rockers' new set "Hesitation Marks," their eighth studio album, is scheduled for a Sept. 3 release, with iTunes taking pre-orders from today.

By Lars Brandle

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With a new recording contact in the bag, Trent Reznor’s Nine Inch Nails have confirmed a September release for their new album, they’ve dropped a new track and there’s plans for a full-scale North American touring assault this Fall.

The industrial rockers’ forthcoming set “Hesitation Marks,” their eighth studio album, is scheduled for a Sept. 3 release, with iTunes taking pre-orders from today. 

See latest videos, charts and news

“Hesitation Marks” will arrive through a new recording deal signed recently with Columbia Records, and announced just days ago .

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Reznor has never been afraid to hit the road in full-force, and he’s promising a “full-on” production this time around for his “Nine Inch Nails: Tension 2013” arena tour.

Live Nation will promote the trek, which kicks-off Sept. 28 at Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul, MN and wraps-up Nov. 25 at Calgary’s Scotiabank Saddledome. 

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In a statement, Reznor says, “Tension picks up where ‘Lights in the Sky’ left off.  This is the full-on NIN live experience realized as we never could before.”

In the late May press release to announce the recording deal with Columbia and update his fans on the quality of the new album, Reznor didn’t mince his words. “For the last year I’ve been secretly working nonstop with Atticus Ross and Alan Moulder on a new, full-length Nine Inch Nails record,” he said, “which I am happy to say is finished and frankly fucking great.”

NIN will today release the first track from the new album, a piece entitled “Came Back Haunted.”

The song, a bouncy electronic track with flourishes of NIN’s familiar gritty electric guitar, can be bought from today at iTunes — and it’s instantly flicked to fans who pre-order the album.  The official NIN Website will stream the single, and take pre-orders for the album from it comes.

Listen to the track here at SoundCloud:

Tickets For the North American fall tour go on sale June 14. NIN has already posted a solid international summer trek , beginning July 26 at Japan’s Fuji Rock Festival.

Nine Inch Nails: Tension 2013 North American Tour:

Sep.28   St. Paul, MN          Xcel Energy Center Sep.30  Kansas City, MO     Sprint Center Oct. 1   St. Louis, MO          Chaifetz Arena Oct. 3   Montréal, QC          Centre Bell Oct. 4   Toronto, ON            Air Canada Centre Oct. 5   Cleveland, OH         Wolstein Center Oct. 7   Auburn Hills, MI       The Palace of Auburn Hills Oct. 8   Pittsburgh, PA          Petersen Events Center Oct.11   Boston, MA             TD Garden Oct.14   Brooklyn, NY           Barclays Center Oct.15   Newark, NJ              Prudential Center Oct.18   Washington, DC      Verizon Center Oct.19   University Park, PA   Bryce Jordan Center Oct.21   Raleigh, NC             PNC Arena Oct.22   Nashville, TN           Bridgestone Arena Oct.24   Atlanta, GA              Philips Arena  Oct.30   Sunrise, FL              BB&T Center    Oct.31   Orlando, FL             Amway Center Nov. 5   San Antonio, TX       AT&T Center Nov. 8   Los Angeles, CA       Staples Center Nov. 9   Phoenix, AZ             US Airways Center Nov.11   El Paso, TX              Don Haskins Center Nov.13   Broomfield, CO        1st Bank Center Nov.15   Las Vegas, NV          The Joint Nov.16   Las Vegas, NV          The Joint Nov.18   Portland, OR            Rose Garden Arena Nov.19   Spokane, WA           Spokane Arena Nov.21   Vancouver, BC          Rogers Arena Nov.22   Seattle, WA              KeyArena Nov.24   Edmonton, AB           Rexall Place Nov.25   Calgary, AB              Scotiabank Saddledome

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Nine Inch Nails, ‘Hesitation Marks’ – Album Review

Trent Reznor is one of music's most important artists of the past quarter century. In recent years, he has written award-winning scores for award-winning movies and branched out with a new band called How To Destroy Angels. But his biggest musical impact has been and always will be as the mastermind of Nine Inch Nails .

With Reznor putting NIN on hiatus in 2009, anticipation was running high for any new material from the revolutionary industrial act. After some rumblings that Reznor was resurrecting NIN in 2013, the frontman announced that the band was back and that a new disc was on the way. Only a few months after the revelation, that new album, 'Hesitation Marks,' is out now.

After the mostly instrumental 52-second opening cut 'The Eater of Dreams,' the album essentially kicks off with the track 'Copy of A.' The beat-heavy electronic number features some throwback industrial sounds reminiscent of NIN's early '90s contemporaries Front 242, except with a mellower twist. Reznor never quite rages vocally on the track, which proves to be a running vibe throughout 'Hesitation Marks.'

Next up is the first single 'Came Back Haunted,' perhaps the most rock-oriented track on the album. Balancing old-school 'Kinda I Want To' dynamics in the verses with a more recent 'Hand That Feeds' chorus, 'Came Back Haunted' is classic NIN through and through.

Following 'Came Back Haunted,' the album takes on a different personality with the trippy, slow-tempo 'Find My Way.' It's the first sign that 'Hesitation Marks' is not really a rock album, but a sonic experiment that finds Reznor exploring new sounds and assuming a gentler voice than he has on NIN's past releases.

The disc proceeds with 'All Time Low,' which is a funk-infused number, while the next song, 'Disappointed,' doesn't quite get off the ground until about halfway through the track. Then comes the jarring 'Everything,' a track that sounds almost nothing like Nine Inch Nails. Featuring poppy verses and a Jesus and Mary Chain-like riff, you'd be hard-pressed to pin the tune as a NIN song if not for Reznor's identifiable voice.

The tracks 'Satellite,' 'Various Methods of Escape' and 'Running' all fall into that trippy ambient category, never quite rocking as hard as fans of NIN's angry side would like. Meanwhile, 'I Would for You' offers verses reminiscent of 'Hurt' before launching into one of the rare rock choruses on the album.

Some of that vintage Reznor angst reappears on the industrial-heavy 'In Two,' but he once again mellows out in 'While I'm Still Here,' which is seemingly a reprisal of the album's earlier track 'Find My Way.' The disc closes out with 'Black Noise,' a 90-second track of haunting discordance.

Twenty-two years ago, on the great NIN song 'Wish,' Reznor sang the following: "I'm the one without a soul / I'm the one with this big f---ing hole / No new tale to tell / Twenty-six years on my way to hell." Twenty-two years later, perhaps life isn't as troubling for the 48-year-old Reznor.

Now, with multiplatinum success behind him, a beautiful wife and two young sons, he's no longer the angry young man who brought industrial rage and lust into mainstream rock with songs like 'Head Like a Hole' and 'Closer.' On NIN's current single, 'Came Back Haunted,' Reznor declares, "Everywhere now reminding me / I am not who I used to be." Throughout 'Hesitation Marks,' that line rings very true.

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Album Review: Nine Inch Nails, 'Hesitation Marks'

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by Barb Abney

September 09, 2013

Just a couple of years ago, Trent Reznor put Nine Inch Nails on indefinite hiatus in order to work on other projects, including How to Destroy Angels — his band that features his wife (former West Indian Girl vocalist) Mariquen Maandig — and musical composition work for video games and movie soundtracks. At the time of the announcement, I know I threw myself a giant goth-flavored pity-party! Sure, I enjoyed the other projects as much as I could, but something just wasn't the same.

On Feb. 25, there was much rejoicing when Trent announced an upcoming NIN tour . I couldn't contain my excitement!

The new NIN album, Hesitation Marks , feels like a familiar friend. I swear there are synthetic sounds that ONLY Trent Reznor or Atticus Ross know how to make — you hear these sounds exclusively on NIN records! And this one is chock-full of those moments, as well as the sounds that give Hesitation Marks a career retrospective vibe. You'll hear some of the industrial-edged angst of earlier works like Pretty Hate Machine or The Downward Spiral on "Find My Way" and "In Two"; some of the dancier material that harkens back to the With Teeth remixes on "Copy Of A" and "Disappointed; and the artsy indulgence of The Fragile can be heard on "While I'm Still Here" and its follow-up, "Black Noise." I'm so thrilled to be listening to new Nine Inch Nails that it's virtually impossible to be critical of it, though I found myself scratching my head on the album's first and last tracks. The first, "The Eater Of Dreams," is less than a minute of building fuzz that starts off sounding like the beeps on a heart monitor but which quickly just builds into fuzz. The last track, "Black Noise," seems like it was accidentally cut from the tune before it, "While I'm Still Here." This CD features the most King Crimson-like sounding guitar work on a NIN record; it's on the tune "All Time Low" thanks to Adrian Belew himself, who helped out on the recording of Hesitation Marks but will not be joining the band on the road, sadly. I keep listening hoping to pick out the voice of Lindsay Buckingham (of Fleetwood Mac fame) in the background, but he seems to be buried pretty deeply in the layers. I'll keep trying. "All Time Low" feels like my favorite song on the CD thus far, but "Copy Of A" is a close second and reminds me a lot of the repetitive phrases in "All The Love In The World" from With Teeth . The beat of "Everything" is so upbeat that once the truly heavy parts of the song kick in, they feel like sunshine and rainbows. And if you need a shot of moodiness, you'll get that in "Find My Way." Trent Reznor may not have changed the face of music on this CD. But he reminds us of just how many times he HAS done so.

• Hear Nine Inch Nails' new track 'Came Back Haunted'
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Hesitation Marks

By David Fricke

David Fricke

“Thrive/Just become/Your disease,” Trent Reznor shouts on this record, across crusty electronics and irritated-­guitar chatter in a song called “In Two.” Reznor is an excellent advertisement for that advice, a resilient, multiplatinum icon of feral machine music and lacerating self-examination. Next year marks the 25th anniversary of Pretty Hate Machine , his debut as the founding singer-composer and main instrumentalist in Nine Inch Nails . But Hesitation Marks is an immediate reason to light the black candles. Reznor’s first NIN album in five years, it is one of his best, combining the textural exploration on the 1999 double CD The Fragile , and the tighter fury of his 1994 master blast, The Downward Spiral . There is blood here: Hesitation Marks refers to the preliminary wounds made during a suicide attempt. There is deliverance, too. You can dance to much of this terror, all the way to the brink and back.

“Came Back Haunted” is that dread, beat and savvy in a nutshell. Reznor has his formulas, and this is one of them: seething choruses of hiss and helplessness, then a perverse rush of triumph in the chorus (“I said goodbye and I/Had to try and I/Came back haunted”). The real devilry is in details such as the dentist’s-drill sustain of his guitar break and the Rolling Stones-like drive that Reznor maintains through the irregular, digital percussion. “Copy of A” has a spare, rubbery momentum, like impatient Kraftwerk, that gradually fills with a mounting crisis of loops, hi-hat sizzle and well-camouflaged guitar contributed by an improbable guest, Fleetwood Mac ‘s Lindsey Buckingham. And “All Time Low” lurches forward on angular riffing by Adrian Belew as Reznor pushes his voice into a Prince -like falsetto. Everything in these songs happens on the edge of irrevocable oblivion. “You haven’t even pierced the skin/Just wait till you see what is coming,” Reznor promises (or warns) in “All Time Low.” But he is doing a lot of living on that precipice.

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Reznor – successful, sober and a father – never uses the word “suicide” on Hesitation Marks . But he has spoken publicly of his past drug and alcohol abuse. This album is about how easy it is to find yourself back in black, out of options (the ballad “Find My Way”), desperate for release (the hypnotic march “Various Methods of Escape”). “Do you ever want to/Just get out of here?” Reznor asks in “Disappointed,” a bit like recent Radiohead with a raga-like hook that suggests the Beatles’ “Within You Without You” – a sly comment on both surrender and rebirth.

Placed at the middle of the record, “Everything” is the perfect high noon, a straight-up rocker about transformation achieved. “But this thing that lives inside of me/Will surely rise and wake,” Reznor admits in there, an inevitability that dogs him to the last song, “While I’m Still Here.” It is a downbeat finish of dripping-water electronics. But Reznor also plays raw, honking sax, like he’s laughing at his own fears. There is also another step back from the cliff. “Stay with me/Hold me near/While I’m here,” Reznor sings before the track fades to static, with clear, quiet strength and no hesitation.

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Nine Inch Nails Releasing Hesitation Marks "Audiophile Version" With Alternate Mastering

By Jenn Pelly

Nine Inch Nails ' new album  Hesitation Marks  is finally out September 3 via  Columbia . Today, Trent Reznor has shared that an alternately mastered "Audiophile Version" will also be available, as a free download when you buy the album through the band's webstore . (Those who have already ordered  Hesitation Marks  from NIN.com will be able to download it September 3.)

As explained  Tumblr , the differences are subtle and for "the majority of people" the differences will be be slim. For audiophiles "with high-end equipment and an understanding of the mastering process," the alternate version could be preferable.

On Tumblr, engineer Tom Baker said it was Trent Reznor's idea to master the album in two versions, "and to my knowledge it has never been done before." He articulated the differences between the standard mastering and "audophile" mastering:

The standard version is “loud” and more aggressive and has more of a bite or edge to the sound with a tighter low end. The Audiophile Mastered Version highlights the mixes as they are without compromising the dynamics and low end, and not being concerned about how “loud” the album would be. The goal was to simply allow the mixes to retain the spatial relationship between instruments and the robust, grandiose sound.

Hesitation Marks producer Alan Moulder, who mixed the record, also posted a lengthy statement on Tumblr , detailing the differences between both processes.

Normally you wait until the record is finished being recorded and mixed, then take all the mixes to mastering. But we thought doing it as we went along might make us push the process further and spend more time on mastering rather than rush through it at the end. Whilst doing this we became aware of how much low bass information there was on the record. Since that can define how loud of a level the mastering can be, we were faced with a dilemma: do we keep the bass and and have a significantly lower level record, or do we sacrifice the bass for a more competitive level of volume? The biggest issue in mastering these days tends to be how loud can you make your record. It is a fact that when listening back-to-back, loud records will come across more impressively, although in the long run what you sacrifice for that level can be quality and fidelity. So after much discussion we decided to go with two versions.

Watch the video for "Came Back Haunted", directed by David Lynch:

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By Madison Bloom

By Matthew Strauss

By Jazz Monroe

By Pitchfork

The Eater Of Dreams

"The Eater Of Dreams" is the first track on the 2013 release Hesitation Marks .

• 1 Song Credits
• 2 Appearances
• 3.1 The Eater Of Dreams

Song Credits

• Alessandro Cortini : Electronics
• Trent Reznor : Vocals, Electronics
• Written by Trent Reznor and Alessandro Cortini
• Mixed and Engineered by Michael Patterson

Appearances

• Hesitation Marks

This is the only known version, notable for being the shortest in length of all of Nine Inch Nails ' catalog. A short introduction track in the tradition of " Pinion " and " 999,999 ," it begins with rhythmic blips of noise, then adds synth layers that pulse at quarter notes. As layers add, its volume swells, and brief snippets of vocals enter in the background before the track suddenly cuts off.

"The Eater Of Dreams" made its live debut on March 14, 2014 as a pre-recorded intro mashed up with " Pinion " during the NIN + QOTSA Tour . It was played infrequently throughout the Hesitation Marks touring cycle , and continued to appear while supporting the 2017-18 trilogy .

While the song is an instrumental, a short vocal can be heard at the beginning in a distorted quiet tone, and at the end in a loud distorted tone twice. It is currently unknown what is being said.

Challengers (Original Score) by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, out now .

Challengers, directed by Luca Guadagnino, is out now worldwide, only in theaters.

Challengers [MIXED], Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ score for Luca Guadagnino’s new film, is available now as a continuous set reworked and remixed by producer and DJ Boys Noize. Out now on all platforms . Challengers is only in theaters April 26th.

Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross are featured on the cover of GQ’s Global Creativity Awards issue. You can read the article written by Zach Baron here , and pick up a copy at your local newsstand.

Moscow Metro Underground Small-Group Tour - With Reviews & Ratings

Moscow metro underground small-group tour.

• See more images

Tour Information

Key Details

• Mobile Voucher Accepted
• Free Cancellation
• Duration: 3 Hrs
• Language: English
• Departure Time : 10:00 AM
• Departure Details : Karl Marks Monument on Revolution Square, metro stop: Square of Revolution
• Return Details : Metro Smolenskaya
• If you cancel at least 4 day(s) in advance of the scheduled departure, there is no cancellation fee.
• If you cancel within 3 day(s) of the scheduled departure, there is a 100 percent cancellation fee.
• Tours booked using discount coupon codes will be non refundable.

Go beneath the streets on this tour of the spectacular, mind-bending Moscow Metro! Be awed by architecture and spot the Propaganda , then hear soviet stories from a local in the know. Finish it all up above ground, looking up to Stalins skyscrapers, and get the inside scoop on whats gone on behind those walls.

Know More about this tour

We begin our Moscow tour beneath the city, exploring the underground palace of the Moscow Metro. From the Square of Revolution station, famous for its huge statues of soviet people (an armed soldier, a farmer with a rooster, a warrior, and more), we’ll move onto some of the most significant stations, where impressive mosaics, columns, and chandeliers will boggle your eyes! Moreover, these stations reveal a big part of soviet reality — the walls depict plenty of Propaganda , with party leaders looking down from images on the walls. Your local guide will share personal stories of his/her family from USSR times, giving you insight into Russia’s complicated past and present. Then we’re coming back up to street level, where we’ll take a break and refuel with some Russian fast food: traditional pancakes, called bliny. And then, stomachs satiated, we are ready to move forward! We’ll take the eco-friendly electric trolleybus, with a route along the Moscow Garden Ring. Used mainly by Russian babushkas(grannies) during the day, the trolleybus hits peak hours in the mornings and evenings, when many locals use it going to and from their days. Our first stop will be the Aviator’s House, one of Stalin’s Seven Sisters, followed by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs — and you’ll hear the legends of what has gone on inside the walls. Throughout your Moscow tour, you’ll learn curious facts from soviet history while seeing how Russia exists now, 25 years after the USSR.

Local English-speaking guide

Pancake snack and drink

Additional food and drinks

Tickets for public transport

Souvenirs and items of a personal nature

Tips and gratuities for the guide

Additional Info

Confirmation will be received at time of booking

Dress standard: Please wear comfortable shoes for walking. For your Urban Adventure you will be in a small group of a maximum of 12 people

Traveler Reviews

This tour exceeded our expectations. Nikolai (Nick), our tour guide, was very knowledgeable, thorough, and has a great personality. He didn't take shortcuts and really covered everything that was on the agenda in great detail. We saw beautiful metro stations and learned the history behind them, including many of the murals and designs.

We did the tour with Anna her knowledge and understanding of the History surrounding the metro brought the tour alive. Well done Anna!

This tour was amazing!

Anna was a great tour guide. She gave us heaps of interesting information, was very friendly, and very kindly showed us how to get to our next tour.

Amazing beauty and history.

An excellent tour helped by an absolutely amazing guide. Anna gave a great insight into the history of the metro helped by additional material she had prepared.

great tour and guide - thanks again

great will do it again, Miriam ke was very good as a guide she has lived here all here life so knew every interesting detail.a good day

Dinamo Elektrostal

Match results.

* Won by shoot-out

About Dinamo Elektrostal

Moscow’s Dinamo Elektrostal are gearing up for their fifth EHL season having frequently picked off impressive wins but have yet to top their particular group in their previous attempts.

They did get the best of arch rivals Dinamo Ak-Bars in both the Russian Cup and the Prometheus International tournament to show they are knocking on the door.

There has been a reasonable level of turnover from 2020 with Anton Noshin, Evgenii Mokrousov, Aleksei Godenkov and Ivan Zuikov joining the newly formed TsOP Moskomsport outfit. Danill Karagodin, Mikhail Nekludov and Ilya Larikov have all retired.

Their replacements are mostly youngsters with Dmitry Zheleznyakov, Aleksei Samylkin, Petr Agapov, Ilia Bartenev, Andrei Gribanov and Oleg Kulakov joining their line-up.

EHL History 2013/14 – ROUND1 2015/16 – ROUND1 2017/18 – ROUND1 2018/19 – ROUND1

ARTEMOV Evgenii

Kuraev dmitrii, proskuriakov mikhail, zaytsev zakhar, zhirkov alexander, arusiia georgii, zheleznyakov dmitry, skuratov andrei, dvoretskii nikita, okishev arsenii, khairullin marat, samylkin aleksei, agapov petr, kuraev andrei, rogov roman, loginov iaroslav, bondariuk nikolai, kulakov oleg, laptev dmitry, bartenev ilia, spichkin matvei, lepeshkin sergey, gribanov andrei.