For reasons I won't get into here, my little brother spent the first couple weeks of ninth grade in a Baltimore psych ward. While he was in there, he desperately wanted one of his tapes, and that tape was Pretty Hate Machine, an album already a few years old at that point. Rather than bringing it to him, my dad decided to listen to it, making it about 90 seconds in-- to the first "Bow down before the one you serve/ You're going to get what you deserve" bit on "Head Like a Hole"-- before deciding the album was Satanic and throwing it in the trash. I tried arguing the point with him ("No, dad, he's talking about money! Listen to it!"), but he didn't budge. For much of the 1990s, Pretty Hate Machine was that type of album: One that could inspire fervent, devotional need and absolute revulsion, largely depending on the age of the person hearing it. And that's even more impressive when you consider that it's basically a synth-pop album.
The greatest trick Trent Reznor ever pulled was convincing the world he was the devil. With his biblical-phallic band name, his reportedly furious early live shows, his fishnets worn as sleeves, Reznor staked out a position for himself on the Alice Cooper shock-rock continuum. Reznor certainly talked a big game about his industrial influences, even taking part in the Wax Trax! collective Pigface, but it wasn't the punishing megaphone-addled arm of industrial that most informed Reznor's debut album; it was the genre's nascent new-wave period. Scene kings Ministry, after all, started out as floppy-haired New Romantics. And so, for that matter, did Reznor himself; Google Exotic Birds sometime.
Reznor would progress further into scraping roar not long later; 1992's "Wish" was certainly no Depeche Mode song. But Pretty Hate Machine is haunted, synthetic dance-pop through and through. The beats have muscle, but it's not metal muscle or pigfuck muscle or even post-punk muscle. "Head Like a Hole", the big hit, is probably the most rock thing on the whole album, but even that song opens with "Heart of Glass"-esque percussion ripples before the drum machine thunder and weird hooting noises come in. "Terrible Lie" is built on synth-scrapes that, in less distorted form, could've shown up on a New Order single, and "Sin" likewise has a whole lot of "Blue Monday" in its DNA. Whenever a verse ends during "Kinda I Want To", we get a quick little reptilian disco synth-fight. Glacial new-age keyboard tones abound, and big nasty guitars really don't. And Reznor knew how to mine this form for all the emotional catharsis it was worth, which was a lot.