Pretty Hate Machine - Nine Inch Nails (1989)

There was a guy I knew in high school named Brian, who was a friend-of-a-friend sorta guy; I didn’t know him well. But his small shelf of CDs (which he talked about a lot, like me) included Nirvana’s Bleach and Nine Inch Nails’ Pretty Hate Machine before either band arrived in the public eye. I wouldn’t really get Nirvana at that point, but I instantly took a liking to this bizarre slab of moody dance pop that was built like the Pet Shop Boys but somehow also wanted to rip your head off.

I hadn’t learned anything about industrial before I heard the first NIN album, so there were some touchpoints I was missing with Front 242, Skinny Puppy, and early Ministry. But this was the eye-opener that got me interested in all that, so I’m forever grateful.

The NIN brand would grow, along with Reznor’s accumen as a songwriter and producer, into something much larger in only a few years. And they would mostly never sounded like this record again.

But you get the initial vision, executed to the best of their current abilities. It was more than enough to fire an opening salvo.