Hm.

I think my top album is The Fragile. It's not an album I can just pop in whenever - I have to commit to it, be in the right mindset for it. And that's when it really shows how fantastic it is. I'm the sort of person that likes really long albums that seem to go on forever, and The Fragile has that feel to it. You start out not really knowing where you're going to end, on the first listen at least. It's really a masterpiece.

After that I'd put Ghosts I-IV. Unlike The Fragile, I can listen to this whenever I want and still really enjoy the musicality of it; most of the tracks are pretty simple, yeah, but they're inventive, and that's what makes this album great.

I suppose it doesn't particularly count, but I always include Still right after Ghosts. I feel like Still is an album that gets overlooked by people who just look at the surface-level NIN. But it's a beautiful album. The arrangements of the old songs are very well done, and the new songs are some of the best of this era. Except for Gone, Still. But whatever.

After that comes With Teeth. This was the first album I really heard front-to-back, and its accessibility pushed me to explore the rest of the catalogue. I think the fact that there's no overarching theme to the album makes it nice to listen to, because you can mess with the tracklist in a way that you can't with some of the other works.

Year Zero is the next one on my list, because the concept was so...foreign to me. The overtness of the theme, the fierceness of the message in the album, was quite impressive to hear after hearing TDS and TF, which were so introspective, whereas YZ looks around at the world instead. The repetitiveness of the songs tends to get to me, though. Every song starts with a fucking drumbeat...

Fuck. What do I have left...

I don't really have much reason for the placement of the next few albums. I'm not terribly fond of how vicious and abrasive The Downward Spiral and Broken are for nearly the entirety of both. I like the variation that 's in the other albums.

Pretty Hate Machine feels sort of dated to me, but depending on the day I'll place it above TDS/Broken (which are pretty much joined at the hip for me.)

The Slip was good when I heard it, but the more I delved into the older work, the more I realized that it was fairly subpar, which is understandable considering how quickly it was put out. But still. Oh well.

With regards to TSN and TGWTDT, they'd probably fall between Ghosts and Still. TGWTDT would rank higher because it, in my opinion, is a greater work than TSN.