Pitchfork

Remember how frustrating it was when Nine Inch Nails would make us wait four to six years between albums? That trend, it appears, has entered the rearview mirror stage, along with the label messes and rehab stints that helped cause those interminable gaps. Consider the new math after The Slip hit hard drives as a free download last Monday: over the last three years, Trent Reznor's released as many full-length records of new material (four) as he did during the first decade of his recorded existence. Since Pretty Hate Machine, the concept behind Reznor's work with Nine Inch Nails has been blunt and straightforward: dystopian techno-metal forged from the fusion of man and machine. But since last year's Year Zero, which came bundled with an alternate-reality video game and high-concept pre-release marketing schedule, and including Ghosts I-IV, which mimicked Radiohead's lossy-leader gimmick, Reznor has slowly emerged as a new sort of cyborg: an artist wholly immersed in the newest digital trends for the distribution and promotion of his music. Like a more magnanimous Radiohead, Reznor's called into question the major-label reserve clause for established, profitable musicians by not just coming up with a new way to monetize music, but just giving it away for free, no strings attached. Instead of "tip-jar," it's "this one's on me."

Unlike its most immediate predecessors, The Slip comes packaged with a crucial difference: the music itself is more satisfying than the sui generis marketing scheme. Reznor's unique capacity to commingle raging industrial bangers with ballads and ambient instrumental passages appears in its best form since The Downward Spiral, and here gains much of the focus and restraint that many remember used to be his calling card. At just under 44 minutes, The Slip is Reznor's shortest full-length since Machine, and it indexes many of his most appealing qualities as a songwriter and album sequencer. His former label Interscope still retains the rights to issue a Nine Inch Nails greatest-hits set, but The Slip plays like Reznor's own minor retrospective, fleshed out with plenty of present-day ruminations.

First single "Discipline" eschews a typically monstrous chorus for an airtight industrial disco grind ventilated by an airy piano and falsetto cooing. It's another solid pop song about constraint from the guy who, following Prince, brought kinky sex odes to strip-mall bars. This sort of control is of a different stripe than in the past, though: When Reznor asks, "Is my viciousness losing ground?", it comes from a long-established and now label-free artist trying to reflexively reassert his position in the pop landscape, on his own terms. One of the pitfalls of perfectionism and digital production is endless tinkering and shapeless experimentation, and "Discipline" evinces Reznor's desire for some sort of framework, lest he get too comfortable cranking out 4-LP instrumental opuses from here on out. In relative terms, "I need your discipline/ I need your help" is sure a long way from the nearly 20-year-old "Head Like a Hole" refrain "I'd rather die/ Than give you control".

Studio hermeticism is still isolation, though, and "Discipline" gives way to "Echoplex", in which Reznor's attention is taken by the sound of his voice reverberating throughout the studio. After a quick swipe at those who've insisted he's passed his sell-by date: "I'm safe in here/ Irrelevant/ Just like they said," he casts his tomb as a seductive, slow-torture chamber, cooing: "My voice just echoes off these walls." "1,000,000"-- with any luck, the album's second single-- reappropriates the "Hurt" lyric "a million miles away" from the context of heroin addiction isolation to a more recent sort of reality-remove, occasioned by a period of declining fortunes for major labels. This sort of self-referentiality seems designed to clarify that Reznor has moved from a self-destructive form of addiction to another, hopefully more productive one.

While I doubt The Slip recording process resembled this (although that would be awesome), the liner notes do hint toward a possible shift in method. Session drummer Josh Freese is accompanied by longtime associate Robin Finck (back after a profoundly unproductive period as Slash's replacement in Guns 'n Roses), and keyboardist Alessandro Cortini, and all are listed in the credits as co-performers. I have no idea how much trap-work Freese does on the album itself, but the mixture of live and machined drumming is The Slip's most appealing sonic quality. It's not a totally new thing, of course-- Dave Grohl played on much of With Teeth-- but here, Reznor strives specifically for, and occasionally hits, the sort of room-mic'd aura that made a song like "March of the Pigs" such a visceral experience. The riff-metal on "Discipline", "1,000,000", "Head Down", and "Demon Seed" can't compete with the best of the 1989-94 era, but it's clear that Reznor's assessing the best of his peak period through the filter of his post-Fragile activity, and producing some solid songs in the process.

The hard-hitting first half of The Slip gives way to a second marked by a more patient form of rumination, beginning with the plangent "Lights in the Sky", on which Reznor unearths the decaying piano from the Tate Mansion for a song that, like Radiohead's "Weird Fishes", finds macabre, romantic pleasure in drowning. "Lights" seamlessly blends into the seven-and-a-half minute ambient piece "Corona Radiata", which ascends to a noise-filled post-rock crescendo before abruptly cutting to the evocatively-titled "The Four of Us Are Dying". Reznor's fondness for instrumental passages on his albums goes back to Broken, but this 12-minute stretch, more than a quarter of The Slip's runtime and the obvious product of post-Ghost compositional confidence, is the only lag in the album's overall flow. It's much easier to listen to these pieces in the context of a traditional Nine Inch Nails album, to be sure, but the pulsing rhythm of "Dying" is nonetheless welcome after "Corona", a lengthy indulgence not quite earned.

The title of "Dying" is a nerdy reference from Reznor to this Twilight Zone" episode, in which Archie Hammer, a low-life mug, possesses the ability to change his face at will and assume the personalities of the recently deceased. The title is its own spoiler, really, but the episode is more than just an ending; it's a 24-minute meditation on the public performance of identity, and the frightening ramifications that can happen when none of them have any bearing in reality. It's the sort of lesson that Reznor seems to be learning publicly, and occasionally painfully. The Slip, then, allows him to do just that: shift between and reflect upon his various artistic and personal personae, without fear of reprisal. Instead of a symbolic death, The Slip feels much more like a possible rebirth.