It’s impossible to tell if anyone’s on stage. The Glasgow Academy is dense with smoke, and you can just make out a silhouette clutching the mic stand: “Hello pigs,” comes a voice from the fog. Lights flash, the music starts, and the dark spectres slowly emerge from the smoke to reveal the cast of this theatre macabre before they throw themselves soul-first into a two hour flight of blackened, angst-ridden fancy.
Onstage, Nine Inch Nails’ great architect, Trent Reznor, throws his guitar and the mic stand around and spits his despondent lyrics into the microphone. But there’s something wrong and worryingly alien to the spectacle. He smiles, jokes with his bandmates, and banters with the crowd.
He’s famously misanthropic, but tonight he seems friendly – as if the dark cloud that has for so long hung over his head has gone. It’s worrying. “Manchester sucked last night, but you guys are fucking awesome!” he says with a grin.
“Show me you’re better than those fuckers!” Has the voice of a disillusioned-generation undergone a permanent misery-bypass? The next morning Trent is holed-up at his hotel to talk about the new Nine Inch Nails album, . It’s there that our worst fears are confirmed. Trent is happy.
It usually takes over half a decade for a new NIN album to surface. Not this time. May 2005 saw the release of , the long-awaited follow-up to 1999’s , the latter the sound of helplessness and despair of drug addiction committed to tape.
Now, both cle.