Nine Inch Nails mastermind Trent Reznor has spent decades griping about the music business, dating back to his complaints about TVT in 1992 and his resulting “secret recording sessions” of the Broken EP. Now in some ways, he is the music business, a power player whose pioneering moves—surprise releases, extreme secrecy, fanbase cultivation, big budget commercial soundtrack jobs—have become global-pop-star S.O.P. So when he boldly introduces his surprise new EP Not the Actual Events as “an unfriendly, fairly impenetrable record that we needed to make” there is some cause for both intrigue and healthy skepticism.
For longtime followers of Reznor, a few scenarios suggest themselves. Maybe he's hoping to stoke enthusiasm for a slight, 21-minute EP that mainly serves as a promotional tool for a trove of concurrent reissues. Maybe he thinks he's done something remarkable, because he still sees himself as an innovator, even though his output since reforming NIN in 2005 has been well-textured but either comfortably formulaic (With Teeth, Hesitation Marks, The Slip's first half) or uncomfortably ambitious (Ghosts I-IV, the second half of The Slip, parts of Year Zero). Optimists and diehards might wish for a third option: Maybe he's legitimately produced powerful and fresh music under the Nine Inch Nails banner. To Reznor’s credit and detriment, he's managed to touch on each scenario.
There are only a handful of examples in Reznor’s post-millennial NIN output where the group have departed from their turbulent, sturm-und-drang industrialism. There’s the piano and Vocoder-driven disco barnburner “All The Love In the World,” opener to the otherwise-toothless With Teeth; the gloomy, overlong and under-baked instrumentals-only closet-cleaner Ghosts I-IV; and on 2013’s Hesitation Marks, the baffling, sunny “Everything,” a rare major-key tune in the band’s catalog. The more interesting of these, “All the Love in the World” and “Everything,” are the opposite of “unfriendly” or “impenetrable”—their disarming warmth is what makes them memorable. Nine Inch Nails have spent nearly thirty years trading on a signature type of abrasive, parents-repelling industrial melancholia—they’ve provided decades’ worth of precedent in this style, and it would be it pretty damned difficult to release anything that could notably set itself apart on these terms. The band’s most “impenetrable” release so far is Ghosts, which demonstrates how that word can frequently mean “boring.”
Despite its rough-edges production, Not the Actual Events is neither unfriendly nor is it inaccessible, especially for fans. It does, however, deliver a kind of visceral fury that NIN hasn’t recreated since its mid-’90s Downward Spiral heyday. “Burning Bright (Field on Fire)” begins with a detuned, overdrive-saturated guitar riff reminiscent of My Bloody Valentine rather than the crunchy, sharp riffs of standard NIN before erupting into a swarm of shimmering guitars that give the synesthesiastic effect of being inside the field aflame. The song doesn’t necessarily go anywhere, but its crude, unhinged force feels vital.
On “Branches/Bones,” the band stays truer to their post-2005 form. A textbook post-Fragile NIN single, it follows in the efficient and winning form of The Slip’s “1,000,000” and “Discipline” or the Nirvana-meets-NIN 2009 single “Not So Pretty Now,” tracks that show Reznor as a biting pop songwriter rather than a brooding noisemaker. However, his decisions to wedge in a chorus of “It’s like I’ve been here before!” and cut the proceedings off abruptly after less than two minutes feel perverse, suggesting a desire to tease what’s worked in the past but deny the full-on pleasure of nostalgia.
Unfortunately, the album’s other three tracks don’t bring enough new ideas or fun to justify that denial. The burbling synth number “Dear World,” goes nowhere and says little, while cacophonous album centerpiece “She’s Gone Away” is a spiritual sister to “Burning Bright” but plods rather than runs; at six minutes of churning sludge, you wish Reznor would have lopped off two and half and added them to the opener. Penultimate headbanger “The Idea of You” resembles a Broken-era track updated for 1997’s Reznor-produced Lost Highway soundtrack, with ear-shredding trebly guitar riffs reminiscent of (gulp) NIN-lovers Rammstein and the clear, plaintively struck piano notes from Reznor solo cut “Driver Down.”
It’s disappointing that after a four-year wait—let alone the pretension of “[it’s] a record we needed to make”—Not the Actual Events turns out to be so slight, at just five tracks with no dramatic shift in form. It’s the least essential non-instrumental album the band has released. But with the subsequent announcement that “two major events” for NIN in 2017 are now also promised, perhaps Reznor himself knows this already, and it will turn out that that this slight record was in fact, not the actual event.
