Nine Inch Nails released their debut album, Pretty Hate Machine, in the United States on October 20, 1989. Issued through TVT Records, it grew from songs Trent Reznor developed during unused hours at a Cleveland recording studio. “Head Like a Hole,” the opening track, became one of the singles taken from the record.
Reznor’s breakthrough as a writer came when he stopped trying to sound like someone else. In a 2012 interview with The New Yorker, he recalled turning to his journal after finding his attempts to imitate The Clash unconvincing. Setting those private thoughts to music gave him something he could believe in, even if revealing them felt uncomfortable. “The words on that record came from a very unprotected place,” he said.
The instruments imposed their own limits. Reznor used an E-mu Emax sampler because it was what he had available, he explained in Kim Bjørn’s book Patch & Tweak With Moog, excerpted by Rolling Stone in 2020. Its limited memory forced him to find ways of fitting more material into it, including recording samples at higher pitches and slowing them down. The unwanted noise that appeared when sounds were pitched far below their original range became useful, too. Learning the machine’s weaknesses gave him more ways to shape the recordings. He deliberately kept some of the performances rough as well. Speaking with Keyboard in April 1990, Reznor explained that early vocal and guitar takes counterbalanced the precisely programmed drums and bass. His classical training gave him technique, but he was more interested in following an instinct than demonstrating how well he could play.
Completing the album also meant making several production approaches fit together. Reznor worked with Flood, John Fryer, Keith LeBlanc and Adrian Sherwood. He had hoped to record the whole album with Flood, but scheduling prevented that plan. As he explained to Keyboard, the sessions instead involved four studios and different mixers, leaving him to edit and combine sections of mixes so the finished album would hold together.
Taking those recordings onstage required another round of decisions. Reznor told Keyboard that “Sin” needed a faster arrangement, while other songs needed new guitar parts. There were passages that had never been designed for a conventional band to play. In a 1992 Chaos Control interview, he described the solution: live drums, guitars, vocals and most keyboards, with taped bass, loops and effects retaining the electronic detail that the musicians could not reproduce. Reznor credited that touring with getting Nine Inch Nails heard. He told the publication that MTV and radio initially resisted the music, but performances supporting The Jesus and Mary Chain and Peter Murphy helped build interest. Headlining shows followed, and Nine Inch Nails joined the inaugural Lollapalooza tour in 1991.
The experience changed how he approached the next release. For the 1992 EP Broken, Reznor began most of the songs on guitar rather than repeating the sequencer-based writing of Pretty Hate Machine. He told Chaos Control that he feared the same starting point would produce the same results. After spending years adapting the debut for the stage, he chose a different instrument to begin its follow-up.
