Yeah, this album is decent, at the very least. It’s Trent Reznor’s debut studio album released in the ye olde 1989 and I think it still holds up. Gets kinda boring at the end (unless you are listening to the remastered version, listener discretion is advised) but it is mostly alright, it starts pretty good and it continues pretty good.
But I do believe that only horned-up stupid and silly teenagers that are willing to get down on their knees and bark for their favorite individuals are able to relate to this album though, as Trent was in his mid-twenties at that time and, probably, was pretty sexually frustrated/dissatisfied. Like, he was so dissatisfied with his circumstance back then that he made a whole-ass album about various different sexually related themes and alienation (and let’s not forget religion, he always gets butthurt about religion), hence, why only teens would relate to this.
If I we’re to describe the songs on this album, especially in comparison to other NIN tracks, I would say that this album, overall, is pretty minimalist. Like, to understand, this man didn’t even use drums here, as he did not know how to play the drums, instead he used a mix of synths, keyboards, vocals and whatnot (he even distorted them synths, fucked them together into the bass line and coupled that audible abomination with his atmospheric keyboard pads used for harmony, which resulted into what we know as the song “That’s what I get”). The results are pretty decent, especially since the Rent Treznor took his sweet-ass time to write his lyrics, which took way longer than to actually compose the music, I think (with “Head like a hole” being an exception, he wrote that shit in, like, 15 minutes in his bedroom, “yelling at a beast without putting a face on it”, it’s filler stuff). Like, he went through an “meticulous and agonizing process” in order to write those songs, which I’m not sure if it’s that evident, but if you know anything about the Trent Reznor, then it’s understandable why and how.
But other than that I don’t really have anything to say about this one, it’s pretty good and you should listen to it at least once, give it a try, see if you like it, especially if you are scared about listening to NIN for the first time as this is a pretty good introduction to Trent's work.
That’s about it. It’s a 8.69/10 for me