Imprinted With A Purpose

Nine Inch Nails “Copy of a”

Trent Reznor has spent the past several years exploring ambient instrumentals and dense, sometimes lushly arranged pop, so it’s interesting to hear him swing in another direction with the first few songs that have surfaced from Hesitation Marks. In a sense, he’s circled back to where he began on Pretty Hate Machine – very electronic, very immediately catchy, relatively minimal in sound if deceptively nuanced in terms of programming. But at the same time, a song like “Copy of A” is a million miles away from all that – the aggression is there but more muted, there’s far more negative space and implied tension, and though he’s still thinking about control and conformity, he seems more resigned than raging. I guess this is what aging is like, basically – you only become more like yourself with time, but your perspective keeps shifting.

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