In the spring of 1997, US current affairs magazine Time published a cover story on the 25 Most Influential People in America. Nestled unexpectedly among heavyweight names from the worlds of politics, science and sport sat that of a man whose music, the publication wrote, “is filthy, brutish stuff, oozing with aberrant sex, suicidal melancholy and violent misanthropy”.
How, middle-class America could be forgiven for asking, as it thumbed through the issue in question, had it come to this: where the name Trent Reznor, of a band called Nine Inch Nails, was sharing column inches with US Secretaries Of State present and future?
The answer was The Downward Spiral. Released three years prior, Nine Inch Nails’ second album may not have been on the radar of the majority of Time readers, but the roots that had grown from its dank, dark depths had sunk themselves deep into the foundations of popular culture.
A concept album exploring one man’s self-destruction, The Downward Spiral’s challenging fusion of industrial metal with borrowings from noise, ambient, electronic, drone and alternative scenes was as complex as its subject matter, and antithetical to the heavy music world from which it was born.
Released 30 years ago this month, debuted at No.2 on the Billboard charts, positioning Nine Inch Nails as the new industrial face of alternative music. It would also subsequently turn Trent Reznor into a deeply uncomfortable superstar,
