One man in a Cleveland studio after hours, doing odd jobs around the building and recording in its downtime, built Pretty Hate Machine almost entirely alone, writing, arranging, programming and performing it himself, then handed the tapes to Flood, John Fryer, Adrian Sherwood and Keith LeBlanc to finish across studios in Cleveland, Boston, New York and London, and TVT released it on 20 October 1989. The machine was cheap. The rage running through it was not.
Nine Inch Nails was Trent Reznor and whoever he needed on the day. Chris Vrenna did the digital editing. Richard Patrick played the drone guitar at the end of "Sanctified". The rest is Reznor and his sequencers, and the record went on to sit on the Billboard 200 for 115 weeks without ever climbing higher than seventy five, the slowest kind of hit there is.
The record label we signed with was not our friend.
Trent Reznor, Rolling Stone, November 2019
Underneath the noise, this is a synth-pop record. The synths carry the main riffs, the songs have verses and hooks, and the family tree runs straight back through Depeche Mode rather than through any metal band. What Reznor added was the distortion pedal on the emotions: the vocal that cracks into a scream, the drum loop that sounds like a stamping press, the bass line pushed so hard it chews through the speaker cone.
That is also why parts of it have aged. The drum sounds and the synth patches are very 1989, thin in places where later records would put a whole factory floor. The lyrics are young. Nobody will argue that "Sin" was written by a grown man at peace with himself. You either forgive that or you do not; the record does not ask permission.
"Head Like a Hole" is the reason the record broke through, and it still works like a drill through drywall: the chant, the drop, the scream, the riff played by a synth pretending to be a guitar. "Sanctified" is the groove record hiding inside the album, built on a bass line you will be humming for a week, with Patrick's guitar droning off into the dark at the end.
The credits explain the patchwork. Flood produced the opening pair, "Head Like a Hole" and "Terrible Lie". Adrian Sherwood and Keith LeBlanc took "Down in It", LeBlanc also worked on "Head Like a Hole", "Sin" and "The Only Time", and John Fryer produced most of the rest. You can hear the seams: one song sounds like a club in London, the next like a garage in Ohio. Oddly, that helps. The record sounds like a man trying every machine in the lab to find the one that screams loudest.
What Reznor added was the distortion pedal on the emotions.
"Down in It" carries a half-rapped verse, the record's argument starter; it is also the hook that got the band its first video. "Something I Can Never Have" is the quiet one, a piano and a voice in an empty room, and it is the clearest sign of where Reznor was going: the template for every bruised ballad he wrote afterwards starts here. "Terrible Lie", track two, swings both ways between the anthem and the bruise.
The second half is where the machine stalls. After "Something I Can Never Have", the record runs out of ideas faster than it runs out of tracks, and "Kinda I Want To", "That's What I Get" and "Ringfinger" sound like sketches the machine finished before the man did. Ten songs, three of them filler, is still a good ratio for a debut built in a borrowed room. It is not a perfect one.
Who needs it? Anyone who came to industrial metal through the heavier records that followed and never went back to the source. Anyone who thinks a drum machine cannot sweat. The way in is "Head Like a Hole", the way down is "Something I Can Never Have", and "Kinda I Want To", "That's What I Get" and "Ringfinger" can be skipped without guilt. The machine still runs. You can hear the fan belt squeal, and that is part of the charm.