“I’d rather kill Nine Inch Nails”: The band Trent Reznor dismissed for the ‘Broken’ EP

Trent Reznor has always had a knack for being ahead of the curve. Even beyond the music of Nine Inch Nails, his eye for developments within the world around him seems almost entirely unmatched. Perhaps it’s because he seemed to have survived it all—addiction, commercial expectations, media scrutiny, and the pressure to say something about everything whenever the opportunity arises.

 

Reznor has valued realism and authenticity since the band’s formation in 1988, knowing that being fake will get you nowhere. Sometimes, this outlook makes him seem pessimistic or downbeat, but this natural affinity for unfiltered masterstrokes is what made Nine Inch Nails so daring. After all, from the beginning, they have thrived on going against the grain with music that simultaneously fits everywhere and nowhere.

Growing up, Reznor wasn’t exposed to art like others were. For starters, pursuing any kind of artistic career wasn’t really seen as such, so he followed his natural talent for maths with the aim of becoming an engineer. As he put it during an interview with The Guardian: “Where I come from, there are no artists; artists were teaching at the high school down the street.” Alongside his “real” life was a passion for rock, which he got his fill from a radio station.

 

“I fucked around with some bad music; I was trying to sound like other bands,” he continued, knowing early on that, to make real, impactful music, he had to stay true to himself and not appear as a carbon copy of anything he had discovered in the radio. This paved the way for Nine Inch Nails, with Reznor never losing sight of what made their music so uniquely tasteful.

One of the ways he made sure he never seemed like a poorly executed imitation of his heroes was the words themselves. While he looked up to bands like The Clash and briefly reimagined their flavour of “cool”, he quickly turned to his journal to find his lyrics, allowing the lamentations and stories to form the basis of his own artistic expression. For Reznor, it was never about coming across a certain way; real power emerged from originality.

 

After several setbacks and mistakes on his part, he barely drifted from this mantra, both with Nine Inch Nails’ material and the deviations he explored at pivotal moments in their trajectory. Broken, for instance, emerged at a particularly interesting juncture, with fights against the record label pushing him against his own desire for independence. “Broken was recorded kind of in secrecy. The record company were interfering in a way I couldn’t put up with,” he told Louder.

 

To rub salt in the wound, they tried to get him to utilise commercial trends to give it a defining selling point, which he flat-out refused. “Instead of saying, ‘OK, we didn’t understand. Just do what you do, we’ll sit back and take your money.’ They said, ‘You sold a million records, now we’re gonna sell four million, but you’re gonna use this guy’,” he said. “It came down to, I’d rather kill Nine Inch Nails after one album and an EP than make records with Fine Young Cannibals because they happen to be in the charts that week.”

 

At the crux of it was a burning passion to ensure Broken didn’t sound like anyone but Nine Inch Nails. Even if others were gaining more mainstream traction at the time, the EP hinged on Reznor’s desire to maintain distinction, even if it meant refusing to jump on trends or sounds that proved popular at the time. In other words, he didn’t want to play the game, a decision that worked out in his favour following the reaction to the EP after a long battle he was destined to win.