Few artists in the '90s inspired such fervent devotion as Nine Inch Nails. With 1989’s Pretty Hate Machine Trent Reznor brought industrial metal to the masses, and with 1994's altogether more unsettling concept album The Downward Spiral, he became one of the poster boys for Generation-X's frustration, pain and mental turmoil. Nine Inch Nails' music made Reznor a superstar, yet, far from giving him the inner peace he craved, it actually seemed to make him even more unhappy.
Battling various demons, and self-medicating with heroin, cocaine and alcohol, Reznor all but vanished in the second half of the 1990s. But when he returned, he did so with an album that was even more complex, dense, dark and personal than anything he had or would ever put his name to again, Nine Inch Nails’ sprawling masterpiece The Fragile.
