Trent Reznor may be considered a music industry maverick among most fans and critics, but even he can’t resist a good old-fashioned reissue.
The musician best known as the sole brain trust behind Nine Inch Nails, is reissuing his first, frequently out-of-print album under the NIN banner, 1989’s Pretty Hate Machine, as a joint venture between The Bicycle Music Company and his former label group at Universal.
Reznor was a janitor at Right Track Studios who used unassigned time at the studio to work on his own tunes. He recorded it all himself, from vocals to guitars to keyboards to samplers. Ultimately, after being rejected by the TVT label, he reproduced his work in studios in New York, Boston and London with topline producers including Flood (riding high as the engineer for U2’s The Joshua Tree), John Fryer (producer of Depeche Mode’s Speak and Spell, Yazoo’s Upstairs at Eric’s and others) and Adrian Sherwood (who’d recently worked with Ministry and Lee “Scratch” Perry). The finished Pretty Hate Machine was accepted by TVT, and it would go on to sell three million copies. (Interestingly, the always-intriguing 33 1/3 book series by Continuum has a volume based on the record slated for March.)
The record went out of print in the 1990s following a well-publicized feud between Reznor and the label and the label’s subsequent bankruptcy in the last decade. Rykodisc did reissue the album, but this set is the first reissue overseen and approved by Reznor himself. (The Bicycle Music Company acquired the rights to the album earlier this year with the intention of putting the album back, to quote Reznor, in “friendly territory.”)
Besides a new digital remaster by longtime NIN engineer Tom Baker and redesigned artwork by NIN art director Rob Sheridan, this reissue adds one bonus track, a B-side recording of Queen’s “Get Down, Make Love.”
Read the press release here (credit to Slicing Up Eyeballs for first reporting the story) and view the track info after the jump.
Nine Inch Nails, Pretty Hate Machine (The Bicycle Music Company/UMe, 2010)
- Head Like a Hole
- Terrible Lie
- Down in It
- Sanctified
- Something I Can Never Have
- Kinda I Want To
- Sin
- That’s What I Get
- The Only Time
- Ringfinger
- Get Down, Make Love
Tracks 1-10 originally released as TVT Records LP 2610 (HALO 2), 1989
Track 11 was the B-side to “Sin” – TVT Records 2617-1 (HALO 4), 1990
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I’m not a huge NIN fan but only one bonus track? There are tons of remixes with every album.
Very excited to hear this remastered… but it would be great to supplement it with more bonus tracks. There were some great remixes on the epic, 10-track “Head Like a Hole/Down In It” CD-single back in the day. And the remixes of “Sin” (the single from which “Get Down Make Love” comes) were good too. Plus, if this project has Trent’s blessing, why not include some of the demos that he worked on before Flood, Adrian Sherwood and company got involved?