In the past decade, Nine Inch Nails have earned more notice for how they release their records than the songs that are actually on them. In his attempts to reach audiences beyond his faithful base of goths and gamers, Trent Reznor has embraced both high concepts (2007’s interactive song-cycle Year Zero) and low overhead (2008’s self-released offerings Ghosts I-IV and The Slip); even a guy who got famous by screaming needed a good news hook to get himself heard over the incessant din of a quick-click online-music marketplace. For his latest Nine Inch Nails release, Reznor is resorting to the most radical release strategy an independent-minded artist can employ in 2013: he’s re-signed to a major label. Those e-commerce experiments proved NIN can remain a viable business in the absence of corporate-funded marketing campaigns, but he presumably wants something that not even 100 per cent royalty rates can buy you: to be a game-changing pop cultural force once again. And despite what tech-topian industry analysts would have us believe, for the time being at least, traditional tools like global major-label distribution and aggressive radio promotion still often mean the difference between an artist being a household name or a merely respected one.
That said, even as Reznor is rallying everyone from David Lynch to Downward Spiral cover artist Russell Mills to heighten the sense of occasion, he’s not giving his Columbia Records benefactors an easy sell: The aptly titled Hesitation Marks is a record that pokes and prods and teases instead of going in for the kill. It’s the first record to bear the Nine Inch Nails name since Reznor announced a hiatus in 2009 but the valorous comeback narrative is undermined by the fact that Reznor often took five years to release new NIN albums anyway. Not to mention the fact that he's remained highly active in the interim, releasing two albums with his trip-hoppy outfit How to destroy angels while embarking on a successful composing career that allowed us to see what he looks like in a suit. And yet Hesitation Marks is stuffed with more knowing resurrection references than Jay Z’s Kingdom Come-- for an artist whose every second lyric has begun with the word “I,” this could be Reznor’s most intensely self-reflexive work yet. But unlike the themes of depression, madness, and addiction that defined his most enduring music, Hesitation Marks chronicles a more existential crisis of relevance. Accordingly, its sound is skeletal and spare, as if picking up right where The Slip’s more subdued second act left off, with Reznor's usual adrenalized aggression replaced with jagged digital tics and queasy atmospheres.