Even now, it feels damaged, noisy, wrong-the product of both a gleaming future and an already ruined past. Mixing digital and analog, sample collages with live performances, densely processed signals with naturalistic ones, Spiral was a drastic renovation to the texture and feel of conventional rock. That you could whistle along with half of it was perverse but strangely fitting, especially given Reznor’s S&M affectations: Here was pain that felt pretty good.
What emerged was a pattern of emotional whiplash: You feel like you can topple the world, shred your tormentors, vent your toxic depths. Even tracks that found continuity with the band’s earlier music-“Big Man with a Gun,” the stuttering hardcore of “March of the Pigs”-were drastically more aggressive than anything they’d done before, flashes of mania that made the album’s quieter moments feel all the more exhausted. Inspired by Iggy Pop, Lou Reed, and David Bowie’s Berlin trilogy ( Low in particular), Spiral pushed the industrial pop of Pretty Hate Machine and the Broken EP in unexpected directions, experimenting with torch songs (“Piggy”), disco and soul (“Closer”), and ballads of such unnerving fragility that listening to them feels voyeuristic (“Hurt”). (Reznor himself remains somewhat incredulous-a note on the band’s own website describes the album as a “celebration of self-destruction in the form of a concept record that somehow managed to become a multi-platinum worldwide hit.”) “I had to do it.”Įven in a shifted mid-’90s paradigm where bands like Nirvana could become famous, Spiral felt extreme-a blast of negativity so thorough that it’s hard to imagine it making headway with any size of audience, let alone the four million or so who ended up buying it.
“Sorry,” Reznor remembered saying in a 2016 interview with Beats 1 host Zane Lowe. When Trent Reznor submitted The Downward Spiral to Interscope Records cofounder Jimmy Iovine, he offered an apology.
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