Nine Inch Nails
The Fragile

THE REVIEW

FIFTEEN YEARS AGO...

1994 was a peculiar year. The year of a fall into a void, on a day like many others. An indecipherable existential void. Void understood as nothingness, as something that even leads to suicide. That feeling was fully expressed in a work called "The Downward Spiral," one of the fundamental albums of the '90s, composed entirely by Trent Michael Reznor, the deus ex machina of the Nine Inch Nails project.

FIVE YEARS LATER...

1999: the story continues. Some survived the Downward Spiral. Yet inside them remains an indelible mark, something that will never leave them. Inside them is fragility. The breaking of one's personality. The soul swallows a bitter pill that remains stuck in the throat. The words to express are choked, bitter gulps hard to swallow.

"tried to save myself but myself keeps slipping away..."

But something hasn't just broken inside them, the whole world is divided in two. It’s scattered, disintegrated, vanished. Only the bewilderment in a vortex remains. A vortex from which one must escape. Escape from everything and everyone, through some unknown path. But where is everyone, one might ask. Have they all been hypnotized by damned stereotypes and false myths? It's complicated to know, it's complicated.

"I can still feel you
even so far away"

There is prayer just to find a way out. There is a need to search for it, digging deeper. No, you can't get out, says a mysterious and angry voice. Yet, at the same time, you can. You can try to rebuild everything that has been destroyed. Recreate order from chaos. Discover the mystery during a slow rise.

"all that we were is gone we have to hold on

when all our hope is gone we have to hold on

all that we were is gone but we can hold on"

And so off, on an adventure that unfolds over two discs, in a continuous crescendo of sounds, between guitars, basses, drums, orchestras, screeching noises, inside a sort of schizophrenic and claustrophobic tunnel. Something that is veiled with pain and sadness, but at the same time characterized by the need to find the courage to rise from the ashes, trying to act in the best possible way. There will remain the memory of this escape, but one can only be proud of their journey.

"It is very, very difficult to reconcile the heart and the brain. Think that, in my case, they don't even talk to each other," said Woody Allen. None of us know if Trent Reznor knows this phrase or not. Yet somehow he managed to do it. He managed to get these two organs to get along.

Because this sonic experience is nothing other than a record made with the heart and arranged with the brain. Perhaps "The Fragile" is the "orchestral" version (so to speak) of the Downward Spiral. Perhaps not. Who can say.

"You remain
I am stained"

At least we will always continue to rebuild the void created inside us...