Not that NINE INCH NAILS has ever been totally out of form but Year Zero easily has more bite than its predecessor, With Teeth, probably owing to the focus Trent Reznor gained from conceptualizing. The double flap cover shows suburban America and its church positioned above a post war landscape of beaten buildings and polluting industrials. They’d be contrasting images if they weren’t both dressed in the gray of the dead. Opposite one another, on the inside, a suited arm presents a bible, the other naked except for a machine gun.
This is what would have been 2022. This is Year Zero.
The instrumental, ‘Hyperpower’, lives up to its name with an edgy strength that ensures an early highlight. Some songs, slightly bloated, could be interchanged without losing effect for the soundtrack that they may become. Lyrically, order makes sense, the bleak landscape what we’ve begotten for greed, racism, religion, and unaccountable democracy. War is rampant and identity dying, measured by these 16 tracks. “I define myself by how well I hide,” is Reznor’s good shot at wordsmith, following with his damaging best here, the pulsing beat of ‘Capital G’ and the condemning ‘God Given’.
NIN is in sleek, dark form.
sinning with Wicked Mike








