Album Review: Nine Inch Nails - Hesitation Marks

With minimal techno and industrial slamming together in an uncomfortable, unforgiving manner, it's interesting to conclude that Hesitation Marks is perhaps Nine Inch Nails' most accessible body of work to date. There's still plenty of depravity, but it's easy to slip into and get tied up with.

After some textured fuzz to warm the ears, the first two cuts doing the rounds online (Copy Of A and Came Back Haunted) are delivered back-to-back, with Trent Reznor sounding as menacing as ever. It's like he's drugged you and is smugly sitting across the bar, waiting for you to collapse on the floor.

The 48-year-old has this incredible ability to let intensity swell to a critical point of combustion, then rip it away before it bursts completely. He knows that an album is more than a collection of songs, and Hesitation Marks demands that you take the ride until the last stop. Everything is one of the more foreign tracks on the record, and ironically it's through its normality. The strains of new wave guitars and pop verses will polarise fans, but it works well as a halfway marker between the musical and lyrical disdain that surrounds it. Various Methods Of Escape is another accessible bullet, with a guitar line that's practically loathing in its tone. Sure, the fingerprints of Atticus Ross are all over this record, but it's yet another dark Reznor opus. And by the end of the ordeal you'll be begging him for more.