It’s a scary time for Nine Inch Nails. Not that the band or its founder/leader Trent Reznor seems at risk of getting sucked back into the substance abuse, label shenanigans, and self-destructive personal demons that characterized their first turbulent decade of existence. In fact, Add Violence and the matching EP that preceded it, Not the Actual Events, are the first NIN releases to include an official band member other than Reznor, Atticus Ross. The very presence of Reznor’s long-time partner for film-soundtrack work implies a creative and interpersonal stability unprecedented in the group’s history.
It’s external circumstances rather than internal dynamics that account for NIN’s fear factor today. Their ferocious performance of "She’s Gone Away" on episode eight of the “Twin Peaks” revival—rather uncontroversially viewed as the most artistically ambitious hour of television ever aired—revealed that Reznor has lost none of his power to discomfit and intimidate. Placed alongside David Lynch and Mark Frost’s visions of atomic fire, indestructible doppelgangers, skull-crushing demons, and slithering insectoids, Nine Inch Nails fit right in.
Back in the real but no less frightening world, the depredations of the Trump administration and its Republican allies in Congress make Reznor’s most excoriating anti-authoritarian anthems—the breakout single “Head Like a Hole,” the Bush-era agitprop of “The Hand That Feeds,” the dystopian entirety of 2007’s Year Zero—sound understated. And as the singer-songwriter continues to wrestle with the same feelings of stasis, hopelessness, and despair his lyrics have chronicled for nearly three decades, his heroes (David Bowie, Prince), contemporaries (Chris Cornell), and acolytes (Chester Bennington) are dying at an alarming rate. In retrospect, the clingy black powder that served as Not the Actual Events’ prankish “physical component” seems less like a cheap gag and more like scattered ashes.
Into this morass, Reznor and Ross have dropped Add Violence, their second EP in a year and only the third (discounting remix efforts) in Nine Inch Nails’ history. At first listen, it’s as perplexing as its immediate antecedent Not the Actual Events. Both five-track records are elliptical, following roughly the same pattern: a banger to open; a bloopy, spooky, spoken-word-heavy follow-up; a centerpiece dirge; a penultimate screamer; and a lengthy, distortion-heavy comedown to close.
Add Violence kicks things off with its lead single, “Less Than”—as close to an outrun/synthwave song as Reznor has gotten since the birth of those micro-genres in the first place. The structure of the chorus echoes “Copy of a,” the proper kickoff for NIN’s last full-length Hesitation Marks (the line “Look what you’ve gone done” is repeated almost verbatim), while the direct-address of rhetorical questions to an unnamed, politically antagonistic “you” recalls “The Hand That Feeds.” But when interpreted as a reproach of Trump voters, the song’s liberal borrowing from Reznor’s lyrical grab-bag can be forgiven: “Did it fix what was wrong inside? Are you less than?” is as close as any recent rock act has come to nailing the right wing’s “You think you’re better than me?!” ressentiment.
From this opening assault, Reznor and Ross scale down. “The Lovers” blends murmured dialogue and bubbly programming, then builds to a disarming, romantic chorus sung in Trent’s warbly falsetto, followed by the ethereal, slow-and-low ballad “This Isn’t the Place.” And if Nine Inch Nails had to pick a song to follow “She’s Gone Away” during their set at “Twin Peaks”’ Bang Bang Bar, Add Violence’s fourth track “Not Anymore” would be the logical choice. Its verses sway back and forth drunkenly, satirically mocking America’s not-in-my-backyard approach to atrocities (“Mouth taped shut, crippled and frozen with fear/That maybe happens to somebody else/No no, that doesn’t happen ’round here”) before lurching into a faster, louder chorus that seems designed to punish doubt and dissent. “I can’t seem to wake up,” Reznor repeats at the end of the song, a brand of paralysis no stranger to residents of David Lynch’s nightmare.
The EP’s final track is both the strongest and strangest. “The Background World” appears to be a slinky electronic groove that might conclude a big-budget Hollywood thriller, serving the same function as Moby’s “Extreme Ways” in the Bourne movies, or Reznor and Ross’ cover of Bryan Ferry’s “Is Your Love Strong Enough?” with their frequent collaborator (and Reznor’s wife) Mariqueen Maandig in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Yet the lyrics are bluntly bereft of sequel-ready optimism: “There is no moving past/There is no better place/There is no future point in time/We will not get away.” Reznor’s detractors tend to mock this sort of sentiment, but in the year of our Lord 2017, who’s laughing now?
The song’s formal moments are even more intimidating. It repeats the same awkwardly edited instrumental snippet—a brief empty hiccup separating each iteration—over fifty times. Seven minutes and thirty-nine seconds of the song’s eleven minute, forty-four-second runtime are eaten up as the segment plays out over and over, each new version a degraded facsimile of the last, until only static remains of the original riff and rhythm. Like an image run through a Xerox machine until it’s no longer recognizable, this makes Reznor’s Hesitation Marks–era worry that he’s just “a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a” legitimate entity real and audible. Its audaciousness would make David Lynch himself proud. As Reznor promises additional work to come in the near future, it gives his listeners reason to hope, no matter how hopeless he himself becomes.
