Nine Inch Nails: Pretty Hate Machine (2LP) [UME]

Why you'll love it

This remastered 2LP set adds "Get Down Make Love," Trent Reznor's cover of the Queen song, plus an 11x11 lyric insert. Pretty Hate Machine went triple platinum, one of the first independently issued albums to do it, and Rolling Stone ranked it among the 500 greatest albums of all time.

This edition

• 2LP set
• Remastered
• Gatefold jacket
• 11x11 lyric insert
• Bonus track "Get Down Make Love"

About the album

Trent Reznor was working nights as a handyman and engineer at the Right Track studio in Cleveland, and he used the empty hours to record his own songs. He played almost everything himself, keyboards, drum machines, guitars and samplers, sequenced on a Macintosh Plus, and the demo landed him a deal with TVT, a label best known at the time for novelty and TV jingle records.

Reznor finished the album in studios from Boston to London with producers Flood, John Fryer, Keith LeBlanc and Adrian Sherwood. Synth-pop hooks meet industrial clang and pure rock fury: "Head Like a Hole" is the anthem, "Down in It" and "Sin" are icy dance-floor threats, "Terrible Lie" stomps, and "Something I Can Never Have" is a slow, bruised ballad. Tom Baker remastered it at Precision Mastering in Hollywood for this 2010 edition.

The album turned up on several lists of the best records of the 1980s, and its blueprint shaped a decade of industrial rock to come. Not bad for something built on a computer with roughly the processing power of a modern toaster.

Also at Kops: more Nine Inch Nails on vinyl · browse Industrial & Goth

Tracklist

Listen

On UMe (cat# B0015099-01), a reissue of the 1989 album.