When you talk about iconic groups of the 1990s that have continued to thrive and remain relevant throughout the years, few groups fit that bill better than Nine Inch Nails. Trent Reznor’s group helped break the industrial rock sound into mainstream consciousness and became a critical and commercial juggernaut, laying out landmark albums of the late ’80s through the mid ’90s in Pretty Hate Machine, the Broken and Wish EPs and The Downward Spiral. Since then Reznor has forged his own path. Albums like The Fragile, With Teeth and Year Zero have seen a constant evolution of the Nine Inch Nails sound into an electronic era that, while turning off some fans of the group’s more rock-oriented earlier era, have created a bold new direction that’s shown Reznor to be an artist who is true to himself and doesn’t feel the need to just replicate his earlier successes.

Since 2007 when Year Zero was released, Reznor has found himself branching further out and whether he’s been toying with new release structures on Ghosts I – IV and The Slip or moving into film scoring with The Social Network and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, he’s always stayed busy and kept himself on passion projects. He’s even formed his own side project How to Destroy Angels. Now he’s back with Hesitation Marks, his first major-label studio album in six years with which he hopes to continue his journey as a musical artist.

As Nine Inch Nails continues to evolve, the group has found its way from industrial to electronica rock and even dipped into a dark ambient sound with the Ghosts albums. On Hesitation Marks Reznor pulls from every element of his previous pieces of work and it both sounds like an evolution and a throwback for the band. A great example is the first full track, “Copy of A” which starts off with a synth line that could have easily come off Pretty Hate Machine; it’s not unlike the opening to “Ringfinger” in some ways. But in short order it evolves into something more authentic to the ground’s evolution, complemented by lyrics that lament being little more than a cog in the machine. Those lyrics could easily be interpreted as a shot at the very big-label music industry he’s come back to, with lines like “Everything I say has come before” and “I’m just a finger on a trigger on a finger/Doing everything I’m told to do.” But these are also not new themes for Reznor, who has been playing with relationships of oppression in his lyrics since he screamed “I’d rather die than give you control.” The track proves that Reznor still has things to say on the topic and it puts the album on a very good start.

Fans of Reznor’s older sensibilities will probably latch onto “Came Back Haunted” as the highlight of the album, and in a lot of ways it is. The track contains the kind of reverb-heavy electro-rock foundations that sounds like classic Reznor and the lyrics, spat out with an aggressive sort of disdain by Reznor, revolve around classic NIN themes but with a mood that feels appropriate for an older and wiser Reznor who has not lost his nihilistic outlook on the world but has paid the price for daring to look into the eye of the monster. But even as the song calls back to classic-sounding NIN, he throws in little touches that modernize it and keep things from being just a warmed-over rehash of something off Machine. Glitchy electronic tones worm their way into the edges of the song’s subconscious to remind us that yes, in fact this is not 1989 but 2013. And that somehow, even in 2013, one of the pioneers of the mainstream industrial rock movement has found a way to stay relevant and musically resonant.

Track List

1. “The Eater of Dreams” (0:52)
2. “Copy of A” (5:23)
3. “Came Back Haunted” (5:17)
4. “Find My Way” (5:16)
5. “All Time Low” (6:18)
6. “Disappointed” (5:44)
7. “Everything” (3:20)
8. “Satellite” (5:03)
9. “Various Methods of Escape” (5:01)
10. “Running” (4:08)
11. “I Would for You” (4:33)
12. “In Two” (5:32)
13. “While I’m Still Here” (4:03)
14. “Black Noise” (1:29