Nine Inch Nails Tickets

Nine Inch Nails, often referenced as NIN or stylised as NIИ, was formed in the late 80s when Trent Reznor, who had previously performed in synth-pop bands Exotic Birds and The Innocent, began to gain confidence in himself as a producer and songwriter.

Working as a caretaker at Right Track Studio in Cleveland, Ohio, he was allowed to make full use of the equipment when no other paying bands were booked in. Writing and performing almost each part, he started working on his first NIN demos such as Purest Feeling, which he sent to prospective labels and which was picked up by the indie TVT Records.

In 1989, Reznor developed this demo into his debut album Pretty Hate Machine. Featuring the tracks ‘Down In It’ and ‘Sin’, both of which had controversial music videos in their own rights, the debut received modest success initially, placing 75th on the Billboard 200. But as their popularity soon increased, the debut began to gain a fan following and by 1995 became one of the first independent releases to achieve platinum certification. Pretty Hate Machine established the dark, industrial sound and impassioned lyricism now synonymous with NIN, while keeping some of the melodic and rhythmic sensibilities of new wave typical of the late 80s. 

As a new decade dawned, Reznor and his live band earned a reputation for a visceral and raucous live show, performing at the inaugural Lollapalooza festival in 1991. After a feud with TVT, he, after plenty of reassurances, partnered with Interscope Records to create Nothing Records, on which the 1992 EP Broken was released. This time reaching the top ten of Billboard 200, the release featured the song ‘Wish’, which picked up that year’s Grammy Award for Best Metal Performance. ‘Happiness In Slavery’, another song from Broken, received the same award in 1996 for their muddied performance at Woodstock ‘94. The song also joined Reznor’s repertoire of controversial music videos, almost completely banned upon its release.

Working from his Los Angeles studio nicknamed ‘Le Pig’, Reznor worked on the second NIN full-length The Downward Spiral, a conceptual album based on man’s self-destruction. While the bubbling, bassy synths of ‘Heresy’ might have harked back to the debut, on The Downward Spiral the serrated edges, metallic thuds and cacophonic fuzz of industrial rock were amped up to another level, as the album’s opener ‘Mr. Self Destruct’ announced early on. The album was lead by the heady, animalistic ‘Closer’ and the thrashy ‘March of the Pigs’, but is perhaps just as known for the eerie closer ‘Hurt’, which Johnny Cash covered in 2002 to such acclaim that Reznor later admitted “that song isn’t mine anymore.” Nevertheless, The Downward Spiral pinned NIN into the 90s zeitgeist, and is considered one of the decade’s classic albums. 

A period of relative quiet followed in the wake of The Downward Spiral’s momentous success, though Reznor worked on the soundtrack for Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers (1994) and later David Lynch’s Lost Highway, sparking a fruitful creative pursuit that would see him score films including The Social Network (2010), Gone Girl (2014), Soul (2020) and Challengers (2024). Perhaps making up for the five year wait, in 1999 NIN released a double album, The Fragile. Inspired by addiction issues, the album featured tracks such as ‘We’re In This Together’, ‘Into The Void’ and ‘The Wretched’, turning down the fuzz to create more dynamism and variety, allowing more space for elements of electronica and other alternative styles. It became the band’s first chart-topping album. 

Reznor’s solo approach from the outset was undoubtedly crucial to NIN’s appeal, but all of history’s creative geniuses have battled their shadows; he has himself admitted in interviews that  he often felt like a loner or outsider. His partnership with Atticus Ross in 2005 was a turning point, then – though he wouldn’t officially be a full member of the band until 2016. Ross, alongside Foo Fighter's Dave Grohl, both featured on 2005's With Teeth, a rock-heavy album that saw Reznor's focus move beyond internal struggles to look around him and comment on wider society. Though more of a traditional album, 2007's Year Zero returned to conceptual format, taking a stronger political angle with its dystopian prediction of the year 2022.

The next two decades were prolific for NIN, seeing the release of albums such as The Slip, Bad Witch and the Ghost series. Nine Inch Nails return to the UK in June 2025, performing at The O2, London and Co-op Live, Manchester as part of the Peel It Back Tour.