The humble beginnings of Nine Inch Nails sounds like a wild story: a young dude hanging around a recording studio doing whatever odd jobs he’s paid to do, working on his debut album during down time. He makes the right connections, sells millions of records, and becomes an iconic musician and producer. The rest, as they say, is history. Such is the story of a young Trent Reznor, who worked as a janitor at Right Track Studio in Cleveland. He used his down He used his and the studio’s down time, often the very late hours of the night, to work on his industrial project’s debut album Pretty Hate Machine , an album that would be an emblematic symbol of the EDM scene, and one that set the standard for industrial music to come. Pretty Hate Machine was released through TVT Records on October 20, 1989. It was a hard-hitting, groove-filled, danceably dark effort, and it quickly gained traction. From the animalistic, demonic bassline of aggressive opener “Head Like A Hole” to the p
If the American Gothic movement had a sound, Chelsea Wolfe perfectly captures it. Wolfe’s latest album (and sixth overall), Birth of Violence , brings her back to her gloomy folk roots. It’s a goth-tinged acoustic album, a departure from her harder, heavier and sludgy doom-metal heard in her previous releases, Abyss and Hiss Spun , two albums that followed the more accessible Pain is Beauty , whose title sounds like an art school kid’s expressionist project. Acoustic offerings are nothing new for Wolfe. Her catalogue features a few here and there, and Unknown Rooms: A Collection of Acoustic Songs is as stated: a collection of acoustic songs from her earlier days. Acoustic music has a tendency to be skipped over, but Wolfe’s should not. No matter how they’re performed, they are desolate, raw and impassioned. If her studio recordings can move you to the deepest bowels of a dark place, they are a whole other entity live with even more depth.