Is anyone else out there excited to see Nine Inch Nails live in 2025? To help get everyone rightfully amped for their forthcoming “Peel It Back” tour (which will be their first proper world tour since 2018), we’ll be spotlighting some choice NIN performances this week from eras that probably deserve a bit more attention. Indeed, everyone and their mother loves Pretty Hate Machine and The Downward Spiral, but a lot of casual fans may not have noticed that most of Mr. Reznor’s 21st-century albums have often rivaled some of his classic material from the prior millennium. Chief among them, for this writer anyway, is 2007’s Year Zero, a brilliantly composed (and sadly still very relevant) beat-heavy concept album that explores a future dystopian world where excessive greed and power run amok has pushed humanity and the planet at large to its breaking point. The result is a nightmare landscape where a drug-addicted/distracted/apathetic populace has allowed civil liberties to erode to the point that ushers in a new era of suffocating surveillance (essentially a police/totalitarian state), with the byproducts of war, terrorism, and ecological disasters as the backdrop.
Sound familiar?
Granted, we’re not quite in the hellish world envisioned on Year Zero yet, but given the creepy, strikingly oligarchy-flavored nature of today’s inauguration day here in the States, we’re seemingly well on our way. So, given all that, revel in this chilling video of “Survivalism”, which seems like an all too fitting choice for these surreal times we live in. Cheers to the future…
Bonus live performance (shoutout to the backup singers):
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