Nine Inch Nails
Broken

THE REVIEW

"This is the first of my last days"... and down goes all the destructive and vengeful rage that a human being can accumulate over two years of subtle torture to their dreams and their reason for living, music. "Eat your heart out Steve", this spectacular mini album by Nine Inch Nails is dedicated to you, a solid foundation for the subsequent masterpiece The Downward Spiral, one of the greatest albums of the nineties.

Background: Steve Gottlieb is a record executive at TVT Records, which manages NIN, and following the underground success of Reznor's band with Pretty Hate Machine, and the subsequent presence at Lollapalooza, he tries to mold the choices of the young Trent according to the record label's goals. Frightened and stressed by the external pressures on his unconventional way of working, he accepts the compromise to terminate the contract with TVT, in exchange for the money he should have earned from the long tour set up for his band. But the money is not enough, and the lawyers explain to Trent that this way he cannot free himself from the contract. Reznor thus chooses the hard line, and at the cost of never making music again in his life, he refuses to release anything for TVT, which is, however, prophetically contacted by the guru Jimmy Iovine of Interscope, who proposes a joint venture for the production of NIN’s future works. To Trent, it doesn’t seem real, and with the remaining money, he rents a recording studio where he vents all his rage.

From this comes Broken, an EP that reaches number seven on Billboard. The violence and despair in these 8 songs catapults Trent into the rock star Olympus of alternative rock, dominated at that time by the Seattle groups. The songs are pure industrial rock, played with the same wounded animal ferocity that radiates from the song lyrics: the few friends around him saw him cry in the studio as he sang them.

Introduced by Pinion, Wish is the most popular song from Broken and also a Grammy Award winner: "I wish there was something real, something true" goes the chorus of the song. It's a new beginning, Reznor is destined to give a human face to a genre otherwise dominated by machines, and even bring it to the top of the charts. "I've stopped trying to make sense of it, my head got lost along the way" Trent screams in Last, a tirade against the pigs who want to corrupt him, and which anticipates the theme of the famous March of the Pigs. The guitar is blasted at high volume, and the rhythm is just that of an ideal rebels' march. Happiness in Slavery... The titles themselves make clear Trent's target, who does not offer the other cheek but proclaims his resounding revenge. Gave Up, a classic of the devastating NIN concerts, is the last step of a path that then breaks, only to resume at track number 98 (the bad habit of ghost tracks...), whispering "eat your heart out Steve". To close this masterpiece, it is appropriate to say, is the splendid Suck, born from a collaboration with Pigface.

Dedicated to those who need a release valve, to those who seek in music a way to exorcise, and at the same time curse, everything that turns the wrong way. Rediscover it, while we wait together for the day of Bleedthrough. This is the first day of my last days