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Sex, drugs and … God? Nine Inch Nails’ greatest songs – ranked!


Thirty years on from their masterpiece album The Downward Spiral, we assess the studies of faith, authority and self-loathing from Trent Reznor’s band

Year Zero isn’t Nine Inch Nails’ strongest album, veering towards the kind of overproduced studio product that Grammys voters like – although there is still a distinct imprimatur to this mainstream blues-rock, as if finished with a black NIN wax seal. And no one cares!” That phrase will have rung through many a slammed teenage bedroom door, but Reznor’s delivery makes it far from juvenile, helped by the raunchy riff – quite possibly a nod to that other classic of pop-industrial heresy, Depeche Mode’s Personal Jesus. Photograph: Stuart Westwood/Shutterstock Hesitation Marks surfaced the techno that had always roiled in Nine Inch Nails’ seabed; its second single, Copy of a, would sound great bouncing off the concrete walls of a post-industrial club space.

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