Nine Inch Nails: Year Zero (2007)

Nine Inch Nails: Year Zero (2007)

Year Zero is dark, like peering through a smoky looking glass. It's also dense and overly-layered, but not always in a beneficial way.

Interestingly, it lacks the introspective musings that NIN usually offer up. Instead, it's a concept album… religious / political nonsense… America…year 2022, etc. Boring.

It's noisy and frustrating; you could argue that so was Broken (1992) and I'd 100% agree with you, but Broken was more focussed and knew when to stop. Whereas Year Zero feels like it goes on too long, dragging me down into a state of sensory ennui.

Some rehashed riffs from The Fragile (1999) excite briefly before being lost in the maelstrom. And while a few tracks do manage to stand out like pillars of light from the flat landscape, ultimately it's a musical manifesto whose underlying concepts will no doubt speak directly to a great many people, but I'm not in that group. Concerning the music only, it's not an album that I get much pleasure from hearing.

Nine Inch Nails: Year Zero Remixed (2007)

Or Y34RZ3R0R3M1X3D, if you prefer the leet-ness version, is, unsurprisingly, a collection of remixed tracks from the Year Zero album. Released just seven months after the original, it successfully fulfilled contractual commitments that NIN had to Interscope Records. The music label wanted another album and they got it. Trent gave them a turd.

If I hated my record label, I'd probably want to do the same, but that doesn't make me cringe any less when hearing it. It offers an even less enjoyable listening experience than the original album, and lacks any kind of cohesive flow. It might make a pretty decent shiny beer mat, though.