Year Zero holds an interesting place in the Nine Inch Nails discography. It’s not the only NIN concept album—before it lies The Downward Spiral; after it the late-2010s trilogy that concludes with Bad Witch—but it has the most fleshed-out narrative of any of those works. Also, albums written and mostly recorded on tour over a few months, as Year Zero was, are rarely this rich, precisely crafted and challenging. (While still offering the aggression, catharsis, lacerating guitars and chaotic electronics one expects from NIN; albeit much more electronics in this case.)
Year Zero sold pretty well, got good-to-very-good reviews and generally pleased both casual and dedicated fans upon its April 2007 release. Yet its reputation doesn’t seem to match its artistic importance. Some of this may be the cost of timeliness: Being the first (and most) political NIN album, it can initially be hard to divorce it from the supernova-bright fire of anti-Bush, anti-neocon sentiment in 2007 and 2008—e.g., “Capital G.”
Now we’re living in the years that the Year Zero storyline covers. The album’s most overt warnings are against Christian theocracy, totalitarian social control, American militarism and drastic climate change, all of which (especially the latter) are very present specters in 2024 for various reasons. Beyond its thematic preoccupations, the sound of the fifth Nine Inch Nails studio album turned out to be far ahead of its time. So much so that if you haven’t listened to it in some time (or ever), you might be more than a little surprised that it’s 17 years old.
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The story beats of Year Zero will make the most sense if you engage with the album’s accompanying alternate reality game, which you should, at least cursorily. (Taking a deeper dive requires a lot of Wayback Machine use and leads to more than a few dead links.).
Here’s the gist: In 2022, a right-wing dominionist regime controls the US, aided by new federal agencies (the Bureau of Morality), corporate powers (Cedocore) and religious groups (the Church of Plano). A drug called Parepin saturates the public water supply; touted as an immune-system booster, it also promotes docility and anhedonia. Much of the populace accepts this fate; those seeking stronger highs use the street drug Opal and revel in its euphoric and hallucinogenic effects. Heavily armed police forces and elite military units crush dissent at home and abroad. There are pockets of resistance—artist collectives, quantum scientists literally trying to turn back time, anti-government assassins—but their effects have been minimal. Climate change is on a speed-run due to 15 years of on-off war: some of it nuclear, virtually all of it waged or provoked by the US. (India and Pakistan, for example, have blasted each other into nonexistence.) Oh, and some people have been seeing visions of a giant, disembodied hand, calling it The Presence.
You get little explicit mention of any of this in Year Zero’s lyrics. It’d be too much to pack into songs people other than absolute NIN diehards would want to hear. Instead, the album makes you feel it. “Hyperpower!” introduces you to this world with layers of buzzy synth, guitar riffage and samples of militaristic chants atop a martial stomp of live drums. With “The Beginning of the End,” one of the more straightforward rock songs in the NIN catalog features a narrator veering between brutal pragmatism (“You wait your turn, you’ll be left in line/This is the beginning/Get out the way cause I’m gettin’ mine”) and an acknowledgment of doom (“We think we’ve come so far, on all the lies we depend/We face a consequence, this is the beginning of the end”). “Survivalism” embodies similar cynicism but with even more pointed critique (“I got my propaganda, I got revisionism/I got my violence in hi-def ultra-realism”), while “The Good Soldier” places us in the mind of an elite trooper who’s less and less able to tell himself “cause God is on our side.”
So far we’re still relatively in the sonic mold of what we’d expect from a NIN album, though “Soldier” boasts one of Reznor’s funkiest basslines. Then, with “Vessel,” the band-aid comes off and we’re overwhelmed by staccato bursts of static, a chiming siren and stutter-stepping drums. It only gets more chaotic from there, with one particular screech-of-static motif (it sounds off as new verses begin) being downright shocking. (Based on lyrics like “I let you pump it through my veins” and “I am becoming something else/I am turning into GOD,” this is likely about an Opal user.) “Vessel” is also our first taste of the extended instrumental codas featured on most of the remaining vocal songs, and this one specifically sounds akin to several computers attempting to eat one another. It’s not the machine clank of “classic” industrial or the rock-industrial hybrid that Reznor made his name with, but closer to the noisiest Fennesz releases or perhaps Aphex Twin at his most chaotically “Come to Daddy.”
That’d be unsustainable over the 11 remaining tracks, so while such levels of electronic aggression do return, they’re usually in service of the story. “Meet Your Master” gives voice to the ruling regime’s brutality (“Bow down in position/Against the polished steel”) with gunshot-popping drums and a pummeling noise-rock chorus. The quiet synth creep and loping beats of “The Greater Good” just as effectively evoke the omnipresent terror of surveillance, and the bigoted Christian fundamentalism on “God Given” is chillingly effective when set to one of the more danceable NIN tracks. “The Warning” takes the POV of a deity or alien force, with a rumbling bassline, glitch-hop drums and buzzsaw guitar backing a talk-sung indictment that feels particularly prescient: “You’ve become a virus that’s killing off its host.” Unsurprisingly, “My Violent Heart” and “The Great Destroyer” couldn’t be anything but devastating: The former alternates muted whispered verses with a roaring electro-industrial shoutalong chorus; the latter begins as melodic digital hardcore but ultimately collapses on itself in a cacophony of static bursts, beeps, distorted synth pads, gurgles, pitch shifts and unpredictable percussion.
To be clear, all these sounds—save the drums on “Hyperpower!” and distorted horn parts on “Capital G”—came from or were heavily manipulated by Trent Reznor’s laptop on tour buses and in hotel rooms. The limitations of the recording situation forced him to be more creative and make quicker decisions, but none of Year Zero sounds thrown together or anything less than deliberate. (To say nothing of the complex narrative. 42 Entertainment did the marketing and execution legwork for that, but given Reznor’s perfectionist reputation and clear passion for this story, I’d find it hard to believe much of it didn’t come from him and longtime collaborator Rob Sheridan.) It’s worth noting this is the first NIN album on which Atticus Ross served as sole co-producer alongside Reznor. The artistic development evident on Year Zero, which Ross deserves at least partial credit for, predicts the even bigger leaps and risks he and Reznor took on albums like The Slip and especially the Bad Witch trilogy. We hear few traces of Zero’s specific style in the most recent Nine Inch Nails work, but the group’s influence is all over the darker corners of hip-hop, electronic music, and even some pop. (I immediately thought of NIN when hearing Lady Gaga’s newest single, “Disease,” and am fairly convinced Charli XCX and her producers know their fair share of Reznor’s catalog.)
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If you combine Trent Reznor’s well-documented love of sci-fi with his oft-voiced antipathy toward the Bush administration’s many horrors—its wars in the Middle East, embrace of the religious right, use of torture, mass surveillance, etc—it’s little surprise he moved away from the inward focus of With Teeth and created some timely social commentary. Granted, NIN wasn’t gonna go the Bad Religion route and spell a bunch of shit out, “Capital G” notwithstanding. Instead, Reznor envisioned a universe in which large swaths of the world took their basest geopolitical impulses to sadistic extremes, which shows through in fragments on the songs of Year Zero. Everything covered tacitly in the songs and explicitly in the alternate reality game felt like worst-case scenarios in 2007. In late 2024, much of it is frighteningly plausible. Hell, we’ve already got surveillance tools in basically every device we use (I expect to see some interesting ads later today). Multiple American cities have tainted drinking water, albeit due to corporate malfeasance and contempt for the poor (especially the nonwhite poor) rather than social control … but is it a huge stretch to think a future government would try the latter? How long can we remain certain that the mutually assured destruction principle will prevent the use of nuclear weapons? Are we just ahead of the climate change point of no return, or have we passed it? And are there not plenty of current or prospective world leaders with enough cynical ruthlessness to find pleasure in being lords of the ashes before choking on the black dust?
We stand on what may be a precipice above a truly horrific future. By the time you read this, it might be in full swing—in many ways, it’s already begun. As yet, we don’t have the tools to send clues back through time and potentially prevent the apocalypse from occurring—which, yes seriously, is the in-game explanation for why the album Year Zero and the cryptic game websites exist.
What we do have is the Nine Inch Nails soundtrack to an apocalypse, if not necessarily the apocalypse we may face. I don’t think it’s accidental that Year Zero’s final two tracks, “In This Twilight” and “Zero Sum,” give us whispers of hope, over a static-saturated, fuzz-bass-driven power ballad and piano-electronic dirge, respectively. The whispers endure, just like this album has (“Twilight” has become common late in the setlists of NIN live shows), but neither they nor the fate Year Zero paints for us are guaranteed. As with all great works of dystopian and apocalyptic fiction, only we can make sure it doesn’t come to pass.
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Wait, how is “The Fragile” not considered a concept album?