Nine Inch Nails
3Arena, Dublin
★★★★☆
It’s 18 years since Trent Reznor last played Dublin, a period of time in which the Nine Inch Nails frontman has become almost as well known for his Oscar-winning soundtracks with Atticus Ross, on films such as The Social Network and Soul, as for his deeply influential early albums Pretty Hate Machine, The Downward Spiral and The Fragile.
Still outside the mainstream, Reznor’s reach may be specific, but it runs deep, as evidenced by the heady atmosphere among pilgrims filing into 3Arena in Dublin on Sunday evening dressed almost uniformly in reverential black.
With expectations high for the opening night of the band’s Peel It Back tour, the beginning proves determinedly unshowy. Reznor’s sombre vocal opens in darkness, a square of sparse overhead lighting revealing him at the keyboards, taking the audience by surprise with the downbeat simplicity of Right Where It Belongs.
It’s a sign of what’s to come: a set divided sharply into the sometimes dizzyingly discrete strands of the Nine Inch Nails sonic template: bare, plaintive piano; scything, hard-driving industrial rock; and Berlin-influenced techno synth.
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It might seem odd to think of a clap-along at a Nine Inch Nails gig, but some of the songs are industrial-rock canon by this point. With 1990s cuts such as Head Like a Hole and Closer effectively ticking the greatest-hits boxes, Reznor also throws in The Hand That Feeds, from the 2005 album With Teeth, and Copy of A, from the 2013 release Hesitation Marks, against satisfyingly immense staging: visuals of driving rain, silhouetted moving figures and theatrical curtain drops to signify new movements within the 105-minute set.
At 60, Reznor remains light on his feet: in a thrilling mid-set sequence alongside Ross and the German-Iraqi DJ and producer Boys Noize, who also serves as support, Reznor, ripped and angular in black, plays keyboards in the middle of the crowd as red plumes flame startlingly above his head. It’s half-gig, half-scene from a dystopian movie.
Following it up with I’m Afraid of Americans, the 1997 single Reznor produced for David Bowie, doesn’t seem a coincidence. Reznor has played the song live before – it was a highlight in Berlin in 2018 – but, with its biting critique of the United States, the skeletal techno bop has only gained in resonance over the years, as political systems shake and unravel.
Some of the most effective moments elsewhere are the simplest: the stark minimalist beauty of The Frail, with its bruised-peach sequence of piano, bleeding into the doomy grandeur of The Wretched. Then, to close, Reznor singing the majestic Hurt: “And you could have it all/ My empire of dirt/ I will let you down/ I will make you hurt.”
Johnny Cash might have made it famous, but tonight Reznor reminds everyone who brought the song into the world.
