Too Early to Tell: Nine Inch Nails The Slip

It was reported earlier on Midgets! that Nine Inch Nails released a new, free, digital album today. I, of course, took the liberty of joining the foray and downloading the album.

In high school I was a passive fan of NIN and really was taken by The Downward Spiral when it was released in 1994. But then came a dark period for NIN and I wasn't really into the expansive, dense music of the followups to Spiral (1999's The Fragile and it's companion remix album, 2000's Things Falling Apart).

It took Trent and crew 5 years after Falling Apart to release a new album. When With Teeth was released I immediately renewed my fan status and fell in love with the album. NIN played Coachella that year, and to see NIN live, returning to the public eye after an extensive hiatus, was absolutely life changing. I had the pleasure of seeing NIN twice more while they toured for Teeth and thoroughly enjoyed each for it's unique attributes. Trent is a true performer, and loves to entertain.

Then, last year, NIN released an angry, subversive album in a series of encoded websites that played along the storyline built behind the album, Year Zero. It was a dense, yet somewhat accessible collection of songs based 15 years in the future, when the America had turned for the worse. Zero was a dystopian look at the future, if we continue on our current path. It was his 1984, and for the purpose of getting him off his record label, and entertaining his fans with an interesting story, it worked. But it basically was a commercial failure.

Earlier this year, NIN released Ghosts I-IV to much acclaim. The four discs of instrumental music played out like a soundtrack to some sci-fi movie (perhaps a Year Zero movie is in the works?), but wasn't anything that radio would play. Now comes The Slip, a return to accessible industrial rock that reminds me a lot of With Teeth.

I've only listened to it once, and I'm going to have this baby on repeat for the afternoon. The cover art is shown above, but each track has it's own artwork, too. If you download the album and import it to iTunes, make sure to open the artwork viewer and check out the series of shots, which appear to be based loosely on Year Zero images.

The music, as I mentioned, is reminiscent of With Teeth in that it is at once industrial and accessible. That was what I really like about Teeth: It was something you could head bang to, but it was also something that your girlfriend would like. And on first listen, is something I see in The Slip as well.

If you'd like to check it out for yourself. Head on over to nin.com and get yourself a copy. It is absolutely free. I'm pretty sure if you like NIN at all, you're going to dig this one.

Too Early to Tell: Nine Inch Nails The Slip