There's music that is dark, and then there's The Downward Spiral.
It's a fierce, filthy treatise on addiction, suicide, anger, and self-destruction conceived in the residence where Sharon Tate was murdered by the Manson family.
There are few albums with badder juju than Nine Inch Nails' second full-length offering.
From the volcanic rhythms of 'March of the Pigs' to shouting about the death of God on 'Heresy' and the carnal centrepiece 'Closer' (all together now: 'I wanna f**k you like an animal!'), The Downward Spiral is far from easy listening.
It's a subversive assault in sound and subject matter that was unlike the grunge and alt-rock you'd regularly see and hear on MTV and '90s radio.
Despite its nihilistic subject matter and dense, depraved sound, The Downward Spiral was also an unlikely, multi-platinum blockbuster that debuted at number two in the US Charts and was hailed by critics as a masterpiece.
Even if you've never charted its depths, chances are you're aware of its reputation. It's a record invoking reverence and fear that vaulted NIN mastermind Trent Reznor to legendary status and altered the musical landscape.
Ironically for an album centred around decay – of morals, institutions, societal grace and sonic fidelity – its legacy remains remarkably well-preserved, its themes and era-defining sound still hitting three decades on from its release.
From Johnny Cash to Kanye West and Oscar-winning film scores, The Downward Spiral's lingering influence has shown up in some surprising places over the years and it remains a landmark album of the '90s that regularly turns up in critics' 'Best Ever Album' lists.
"It was hard to do, and it beat the shit out of me," Reznor told Kerrang! in 2014. "But I'm proud of it."
At its heart, The Downward Spiral charts a narrative descent that's as ugly as it is absorbing. It's essentially one man's tortured, semi-autobiographical primal scream.
Nine Inch Nails' beginnings
Born in 1965 and raised on a farm in rural Pennsylvania, Michael Trent Reznor was a teenage nerd.
A classically trained pianist and video game obsessive, he got his start playing synth in high school bands and began studying computer programming in college.
After a year, he dropped out and moved to Cleveland, Ohio to pursue a career in music, supporting himself by working at the local recording studio, fetching coffees, cleaning the toilet and, occasionally, assisting with engineering.
It was there Reznor cut his first demos as Nine Inch Nails, catching the attention of TVT Records who signed him and released 1989 debut album Pretty Hate Machine.
Filled with angsty synthpop that appeared in lineage with dystopic industrial rock icons Throbbing Gristle and Skinny Puppy, but sounding closer to an aggressive take on Depeche Mode and Gary Numan, the album was an unexpected hit – selling over a million copies and staying in the US charts for over 100 weeks.
The success only fuelled tensions between Nine Inch Nails and TVT Records founder Steve Gottlieb, who'd allegedly dismissed Reznor's debut as "an abortion" before demanding a more commercial sequel.
"Basically, we were on a label that thought we were a nice little pop band," Reznor told triple j's Francis Leach in 1994.
"When we weren't that, or when we maybe showed promise at being something that wasn't quite as easily definable and marketable, the problems arose."
This led Reznor to storied record exec Jimmy Iovine, who struck long negotiations to get NIN off TVT and onto his own label, Interscope.
It became "a very hellish, drawn-out procedure that was full of all kinds of threats," Reznor added.
Eventually, he struck a deal with Interscope that afforded him the opportunity to start his own imprint – Nothing Records – and, more significantly, a major label budget big enough to convert a secluded L.A. ranch into a new at-home studio.
The location? The site of one of America's most infamous murders.
Hey pig, piggy
In 1992, Reznor signed a lease on 10050 Cielo Drive in Beverly Hills – the same address where, on August 9, 1969, members of the Manson Family cult brutally murdered five people. That famously included Hollywood actress Sharon Tate, then-wife of director Roman Polanski, and their unborn child.
Reznor named his new headquarters 'Le Pig', in reference to the word 'pig' being scrawled in Tate's blood on the front door. For years, he's maintained that he didn't originally know the estate's background, even expressing regrets after an encounter with Tate's sister as he recounted in a 1997 Rolling Stone interview.
In any case, the 'Tate house' has become enshrined as part of The Downward Spiral's looming legacy. But whatever cursed energy the residence provided was only compounded by the bad mojo Reznor himself brought to the project.
Recorded over an intensive 18 months, the frontman slid further into addiction as he struggled to translate his tortured thoughts to tape.
"The idea behind the album is of someone who sheds everything around them to a potential nothingness, but through career, religion, relationship, belief and so on." Reznor told Select magazine in 1994.
That's underselling it. Hitting play, the listener is greeted with the sound of a man being beaten (sampled from George Lucas' student film THX 1138) on opener 'Mr. Self Destruct', a distorted blast that sets the thematic tone.
The abrasive 'Ruiner' and 'The Becoming' stare into the void and embrace the bleak reflections that stare back, while the vicious 'Reptile' and 'Piggy' are nasty kiss-offs to soured relationships. (The latter is rumoured to address ex-bandmate Richard Patrick, who left during the recording of TDS to form rival band Filter).
Even the album's shortest track – 'Big Man With A Gun', intended as a parody of "misogynistic gangsta rap bullshit" – stirred outrage among American conservatives, with political figures citing its lyrics in a censorship crusade against music "peddling violence" to youth.
"I don't know that I could write a happy song," Reznor told triple j in 1994. "But if I could, I wouldn't put it on this record cos it doesn't fit the theme …You needed to be in the right mood to listen to it.
"For that mood it might be the greatest record in the world. But it's not your all-purpose, life-assuring record."
The Becoming
To dissociate himself from the wave of NIN imitators that sprung up in the wake of 1992's metal-leaning Broken EP (with suggestive band names like Stabbing Westward, Gravity Kills, and Orgy), Reznor set about crafting a more expansive sound for The Downward Spiral.
"I tried to make it something that opened the palate for NIN, so we don't get pigeon-holed," he told Hot Metal Magazine in 1994.
Though he was the driving creative force, Reznor wasn't working in isolation, recruiting an inner circle of key personnel, which included King Crimson guitarist Adrian Belew, Jane's Addiction drummer Stephen Perkins, and renowned co-producer Mark 'Flood' Ellis.
"It was a conscious effort to focus more on texture and space, rather than bludgeoning you over the head for an hour with a guitar."
With a greater emphasis on sound design, The Downward Spiral excels at dynamic contrasts.
There's tension in how it regularly snatches beauty from the jaws of dissonance, or how those same moments of reprieve are swallowed up in the next calculated blast of intensity and volume.
Acoustic guitar rises out of loops of sampled screaming on 'The Becoming', melodic piano breaks temporarily halt the hammering 'March of the Pigs', 'A Warm Place' provides an ambient oasis between the sonic violence of 'Big Man With A Gun' and 'Eraser'.
That attention to detail gives the music an immersive quality, synthetic sounds with a surreal organic character. It is visceral, sinewy, and grimy – much like the evocative album artwork by British artist Russell Mills.
Nowhere are those features more apparent than on the album's breakout hit single, 'Closer'.
A sinister mutation of Prince at his horniest, 'Closer' grooves like a motherf**ker – a black light disco of filthy synths and ominous, piston-pumping beats.
Backed by a music video stocked with transgressive imagery, Reznor lamented that the song's meaning was widely misinterpreted as an ode to lust.
In his mind, 'Closer' is a twisted cautionary tale to the dangers of seeking deliverance from self-loathing through sex, which can become as addictive and dangerous a vice as drugs and religion.
"It's super negative and super hateful… It's 'I am a piece of shit, and I am declaring that and if you think you want me, here I am'," Reznor told Details in 1995.
"I didn't think it would become a frat-party anthem or a titty-dancer anthem."
Regardless, '…f**k you like an animal' became a catchphrase and 'Closer' transformed the rakish 29-year-old Reznor into a gothic sex symbol as it soared to the business end of the charts. That included reaching #2 in triple j's Hottest 100 of 1994 (and re-appearing in three more 'All Time' editions of the annual countdown).
The spiral's impact
The Downward Spiral made Reznor an influential pop culture icon, his status further cemented by Nine Inch Nails' iconic, mud-slinging performance at Woodstock '94.
The subsequent Self Destruct world tour only levelled up the band's profile but personally, the ferocious performances, pressures of fame and colossal drug consumption was taking its toll on Reznor.
"The Downward Spiral became a self-fulfilling prophecy," Reznor told Kerrang! in 1999. "I wound up distorted; someone I didn't know."
From the outside, Reznor's turmoil didn't seem to affect his creative output.
In 1995, he produced and mentored shock rocker Marilyn Manson then toured and collaborated with his idol, David Bowie.
He composed the music and sound effects for 1996 video game blockbuster Quake and served as producer on the soundtrack to Oliver Stone's controversial 1994 movie Natural Born Killers and David Lynch's surreal 1997 film Lost Highway – Reznor's first in-roads to becoming the multi-award-winning film score composer he is today.
It took five years for him to officially follow-up The Downward Spiral, and by the time 1999 double album The Fragile came around, it was released into a musical landscape that had been shaped by the mainstream appetite for darker music The Downward Spiral had sparked.
It's hard to imagine acts like KoRn, Limp Bizkit, Rammstein, Slipknot, and Linkin Park finding such strong footing in the mainstream if not for the album's success and legacy. And it helped cut a path for electro punks The Prodigy — controversial lyrics and music videos included.
There's a lot of Nine Inch Nails DNA in the abrasive industrial sound of Yeezus, the hugely influential 2013 Kanye West record that some consider his last truly great album.
Plus, nobody would have predicted shapeshifting mid-2010s pop star Halsey to tap Reznor and his bandmate Atticus Ross to producer 2021's If I Can't Have Love, I Want Power, her album about "the joys and horrors of pregnancy and childbirth".
These days, Reznor and Ross are best known as one of Hollywood's most prolific composers. Their list of clients spans from David Fincher and Leonardo DiCaprio to Pixar, with an output rivalling NIN's discography and expanding their trophy shelf with an Academy Award, Emmy, Grammy, BAFTA and Golden Globe.
Reznor has done plenty of meaningful, revered work in the years since The Downward Spiral but nothing as widely recognised or revered. And, surprisingly, part of the album's extended life span is thanks to Johnny Cash.
'Hurt' – the perfect swan song
Much has already been written about Cash's cover of 'Hurt' – The Downward Spiral's powerful curtain-closer (including us here at Double J).
But the cliff notes version is that Cash's rendition – released a year before the country music legend's death – was so moving that Reznor himself once famously said "that song isn't mine anymore."
To a wider, mainstream audience with minimal exposure to The Downward Spiral, that would seem true, especially given how Cash's 'Hurt', bolstered by its touching music video, was swiftly embedded as a fitting eulogy to the career of one of America's all-time music greats.
But Reznor shouldn't be so quick to disown what remains one of his greatest artistic triumphs.
Cash's rendition isn't better, it's just different. His legendary status and weathered voice is devastating, sure, but it underscores a sense of tragic poignancy already inherent in Reznor's anguished original.
To the NIN faithful, 'Hurt' is a haunting confessional that wraps raw pain, addiction and regrets into an eerie, restrained atmosphere that hits all the harder having come in the wake of the punishing sounds and imagery that have come before it on the album.
Originally, the song "just felt like it could be a little coda to the end of the record," as Reznor detailed in an episode of Netflix's Song Exploder.
"It reflects back with a sense of loss and regret and longing, that might make the whole record feel more powerful and interesting."
Mission accomplished. 'Hurt' brings The Downward Spiral to a pitch-perfect sonic and thematic conclusion: a man at his absolute lowest, left to survey his "empire of dirt" and reckon with the ashes his scorched earth attitude has wrought.
'Hurt' is an emblematic part of what makes The Downward Spiral so accomplished, and why it remains so relevant three decades on.
Very few artists have created something as deeply unsettling and immensely popular before or since. It's achieved a canonised status as something to be dissected and studied. (And you can't say that of too many of NIN's contemporaries or acolytes.)
Listening today, the album has aged beautifully.
For all the synths and samples that relied on (what is now ancient) technology, the music feels like it was made with human hands with dirt under the fingernails rather than by clinical machines.
The days of shattering keyboards and screaming atop heaving mosh pits behind him, Reznor is now a happily married 58-year-old father of five.
He's a largely mellowed-out elder rock statesman, but The Downward Spiral remains a potent document of the darkness he endured, giving voice to a raw anger, loneliness and disenchanted frustration that continues to resonate.
'I want to do something that matters' Reznor bellows prophetically in the menacing 'I Do Not Want This'. To a whole generation of music fans, scholars, and historians, he very much has.