Rank NIN Albums

[elevenism]

Ok so I'm gonna try to do this. I've been listening to nin since broken came out and first saw them in 94.

1. Broken/Fixed
2. TDS
3. Still
4. The Fragile
5. PHM
6. Year Zero
7. Trilogy
8. The Slip
9. Ah-Witha Teeth- Uh
10. Hesitation Marks
11. Ghosts

I HIGHLY doubt anything will top broken and fixed for me. I've loved every era of NIN but my favorite was pre internet, when we didn't know much about the man (I misread his name as Renzor at first) and the music and aesthetic had a "goddamn this is horrifying but I can't look away" quality.

[slopesandsam]

My NIN fandom started with Marilyn Manson (I feel like this was a pretty common story among NIN fans in the late 90s?), when I learned that the guy who'd produced ACS was NIN. This caused my to seek out PHM (thinking that I should start from the beginning, as if a discography is like a book series or something, to be consumed in chronological order) and bounced off it pretty hard. It wasn't until about a year after that that someone basically forced TDS into my hands and I listened to it. TDS blew my mind. I remember saying "it's like my brain is a lock and I finally found the key!"


ACS also led me to a second revelation about NIN. Back then I was a penniless teenager, and stereos and discmen and such were much more expensive. So the only way I ever listened to music was on a shitty little stereo I had in my room. It wasn't until I was up really late studying one night, and my brother came and knocked on my door, told me to turn my damn music down so he could sleep, and thrust his discman into my hands. I was halfway through listening to ACS at the time, so I stuck it in the discman, skipped to the track I was up to, and listened to it on headphones for the first time. My mind was blown again, because I could suddenly hear that there was way more going on in the music than I'd ever noticed before. Of course, I put TDS on right after that. From that point on, I was headphones all the way with NIN.


I was super hyped for TF. I still have nostalgia for the cool snippets of music that were posted on nin.com in the lead up to the release. I rode my bike down to the music store on September 20 so I could be there at 9 am. I had to get the guy to go look in the back, then open up a cardboard box full of copies of TF. Then I rode straight home, told the family not to disturb me, turned off my lights, and strapped on the headphones. The experience is actually one of the fondest memories I have. TF remains the gold standard for products I was hyped for that actually lived up to the hype. Exceeded it, even.


All this is preamble to explain why I just don't really like WT. Because I can remember the six year wait between albums, when there was almost total silence from the NIN camp. It got to the point where I really started to believe that NIN were just done. Then WT was announced, and it seemed like a goddamned miracle. And when it came out I did the same thing - went straight to a music store, bought a copy, went home, turned off the lights, stuck in my headphones and...


...I found myself listening to what sounded to me like a middling rock album, with some very minor NIN flourishes. The incredible layers of sound were stripped away. A couple of the songs were solid rockers, but most of them just seemed kinda bland. (Actually, another total sidenote: something I'd forgotten until I was reading through the comments on this thread was that everyone's favourite song off WT seemed to be Sunspots. I've always found that really baffling, as I thought it wasn't just a bad song, but also a very un-NIN sounding song. People also seemed to hate the title track, which was the only song on the album I really loved.) I actually tried very hard to convince myself that I loved WT, but deep down I knew I didn't. I don't think I actually admitted it to myself until YZ came out. YZ was everything I'd wanted WT to be: new and totally different, but still unmistakably NIN. It was only once I had that confirmation that NIN were still the band I loved that I was able to let go of the lie I'd been telling myself about WT.


And the thing is, I've loved everything NIN has put out since then. WT is just this weird glitch in the discography for me. I've tried listening to it a bunch, to see if I would warm up to it the way I eventually warmed to PHM. But no. It never clicked.

[ItsChrisRoss]

This would be mine:

1.The Fragile
2. TDS
3. PHM
4. Broken/Fixed
5. With Teeth
6. Year Zero
7. Trilogy
8. The Slip
9. Hesitation Marks
10. Still
11. Ghosts

[ryanmcfly]

1. Year Zero
2. The Fragile
3. Hesitation Marks
4. The Downward spiral
5. With Teeth
6. Trilogy
7. PHM
8. The Slip
9. Broken (nothing wrong with it, just not as good as the others. Prefer listening to live versions of the songs on this one.)
10. Ghosts

[PhoenixML]

Side question: Are there any fans who really love WT who were fans before WT was released? Everybody I've seen who loves WT usually also mentions that it was their first NIN experience. I'm interested to know if there's fans who started listening to NIN in the 80s or 90s who were super happy with WT and still love it today?

I became fan around 2004. So... kinda?

[Xen]

Main Albums:

----- Masterpiece -----

1. Fragile - The quintessential NIN album, best combo of heavy/light and complex/minimalist. Band lineup, arrangement, and production was at the peak.
2. Downward Spiral - This album sets them apart from the rest of the alternative acts of the time. Absolutely no filler, and nobody could match the band's raw energy.

----- Excellent -----

3. Still - Best aural representation of depression/hopelessness, contains 3 of Trent's best instrumentals.
4. Broken - Best aural representation of rage/nihilism, contains best cover done by NIN.

----- Very Good -----

5. Year Zero - Great follow up to a lackluster comeback album (in my opinion), most singularly focused and complete post-Fragile album.
6. Ghosts I-IV - Great experimentation and concept, proves that Trent doesn't need lyrics to make evoke emotions from the listeners.

----- Good -----

7. With Teeth - Great start, average middle, and good finish to the album. First album on my list to contain filler tracks in my opinion, but still lots of classic songs.
8. Pretty Hate Machine - Several good/great songs, surprisingly catchy, but with some of the cheesiest lyrics in the entire catalog.
9. NTAE/AV/3rd EP Trilogy - Some good impressions at first, especially after the let down I had after hearing Hesitation Marks. Not complete grade due to the third EP being unreleased so far.

----- Average -----

10. The Slip - A couple of great songs, some other good tracks, but overall sounds like B-sides from WT and YZ sessions.
11. Hesitation Marks - My hopes were pretty high after hearing Came Back Haunted, but this album was a let down for me because of the generic sounding slower sections (unlike the slow songs from Fragile/WT/YZ which were unique and sounded nothing like the other).

Remix Albums

1. Further Down the Spiral - Best collabs/remixes and awesome experimentation
2. Closer to God - Ditto
3. March of the Pigs - See 1 and 2 but kinda short
4. Year Zero Remixed - Some great remixes, similar in theme to YZ but different enough as well.
5. Things Falling Apart - Very good remixes but also some filler and crappy ones too.
6. Fixed - I like the effort but way too noisy and weird for me.
7. The Perfect Drug - Wasn't feeling it, most remixes seemed half-baked to me.

OK after listening to NTAE/AV/BW a few more times, I'm putting it up to the Very Good category instead of the Good. The ranking is now like this:

1. Fragile
2. Downward Spiral
3. Still
4. Broken
5. Year Zero
6. NTAE/AV/BW
7. Ghosts I-IV
8. With Teeth
9. Pretty Hate Machine
10. The Slip
11. Hesitation Marks

[StockAvuryah]

OK after listening to NTAE/AV/BW a few more times, I'm putting it up to the Very Good category instead of the Good. The ranking is now like this:

1. Fragile
2. Downward Spiral
3. Still
4. Broken
5. Year Zero
6. NTAE/AV/BW
7. Ghosts I-IV
8. With Teeth
9. Pretty Hate Machine
10. The Slip
11. Hesitation Marks

Nothing more weird than ordering albums that way in supposedly objective categories (referring to the quoted post). Saying it's "good" or "average" doesn't mean anything. It's just condescending. One of the reason "professionnal" reviewers are more often than not full of shit.

[dlb]

01. The Fragile
02. With Teeth
03. Hesitation Marks
04. Downward Spiral
05. Broken
06. Pretty Hate Machine
07. NTAE/AV/BW
08. Ghosts I-IV
09. The Slip
10. Year Zero
11. Ghosts I-IV

[Valknut]

1. Still
2. Bad Witch
3. Not The Actual Events
4. Add Violence
5. Ghosts I-IV
6. The Fragile
7. The Downward Spiral
8. Broken
9. The Slip
10. Year Zero
11. Hesitation Marks
12. With Teeth
13. Pretty Hate Machine

[Xen]

Nothing more weird than ordering albums that way in supposedly objective categories (referring to the quoted post). Saying it's "good" or "average" doesn't mean anything. It's just condescending. One of the reason "professionnal" reviewers are more often than not full of shit.

Do you have a problem with the way I prefer to sort things out? I was referring to my own damn quote from a few months ago, not somebody else's so who am I offending here? I find it peculiar that you chose to single me out among all the posters in this thread who also put longer analysis into their lists. Plus my list is simply an opinion like everybody else's list on this thread, so who am I condescending towards?

[notsoprettynow]

1. the fragile
2. the downward spiral
3. trilogy
4. pretty hate machine
5. with teeth
6. the slip
7. year zero
8. broken
9. hesitation marks
10. ghosts

[loopcloses]

1. The Downward Spiral - Probably impossible to top, honestly. I don't want to say TR was at his creative peak here, but if he wasn't he was definitely near it, and more importantly had such agonizing attention to detail and patience that I don't see him having again as a family man in his fifties. That's not a bad thing, and I actually prefer him experimenting and cranking out material instead of spending years perfecting one record at this stage in the game.

2. Year Zero - generally a "safer" record than the 90s stuff, but makes up for it through sheer scope and quality. Most of the songs follow a similar structure, but when they're as good as "Vessel" or "Me, I'm Not" and feel like such pieces of a whole, it's easy to overlook. That's to say nothing of what's largely the best lyrical work of TR's career (it's heavy-handed at times, but it works given the context).

3. Bad Witch - the only negative I really can offer is that it feels slight due to the abbreviated length. The material here feels massive, and a few extra tracks that maintain that standard of quality would maybe have this sitting alongside Spiral. The instrumental focus and ambition is an obvious strength, but what's more surprising is how adventurous the first half feels. I never expected straight rock songs from NIN to be this goddamn good at this stage in the game.

4. The Fragile - the biggest and maybe boldest release, and the deeply personal magnum opus of the catalog. The instrumentation is dizzyingly good, and there's musical detours that remain totally unique to the NIN library (and popular music as a whole).

5. The Slip - low key, possibly my favorite NIN record to listen to. Slick, tight production, with a memorable track sequencing that opens with tight, punchy rock songs before gradually unraveling into dense, somewhat structureless experimental work. Above all else, it's all great; the rock tracks are at once catchy and fresh, and the album only raises the bar as it slowly introduces more layers and atmosphere in "Echoplex" and "Head Down" before blowing the whole thing open.

6. Broken - classic, fist fuck, pigs get what pigs deserve, etc. The nuance of later material is mostly absent but everything here hits and hits hard.

7. Add Violence - would have this over Broken, if not for one thing. "The Lovers", "This Isn't the Place", and "The Background World", while lacking the abrasiveness NIN is known to trade in, are all terrific, haunting tracks that convey a sense of supreme, somber dread... a sense of everything moving towards its permanent end, and an inability to do anything about it. "Not Anymore" doesn't quite nail that atmosphere, but still holds it near and adds urgency and aggression. But shit, man, "Less Than" just really doesn't sound like it belongs here, and it doesn't help that it's also relatively boring as far as NIN singles go.

8. Not the Actual Events - lacking a single blowaway track, but a cohesive unit of unease and filth and uncertainty, and a corner-turning moment for TR as a lyricist--none of the campiness often associated with his lyrics is to be found here, instead pivoting to an uneasy rambling, almost schizophrenic style, with unnerving, repeated refrains like "NONE OF THIS IS HAPPENING" carrying a lot of weight when compared to the usual AABB rhymes.

9. Hesitation Marks - combines the danciness of PHM and the accessibility of With Teeth to make an album better than either. The highlights are usually in the extended outros, taking the beat of the song preceding it and building this atmospheric appendix to it--this happens pretty often, on "Came Back Haunted", "Find My Way", All Time Low", "Disappointed", "Everything", "Satellite", "Running", "While I'm Still Here/Black Noise"--but it never really runs out of steam, and they're what stuck with me moreso than most of the hooks or verses of the songs. Except "In Two"--everything about that song stuck with me, because it rules.

10. Pretty Hate Machine - an outstanding campy cross between 80s dance and rock, and your mileage will vary on the basis of how appealing that sounds. Lots of catchy songs with badass synth breakdowns, with some legitimately awful (yet charming in their own way) lyrics.

11. With Teeth - comes together nicely in the back half with some great pop tracks in "Only" through "Sunspots" and two beautiful closing tracks, and with other bright spots throughout (the bridge from "With Teeth" is tragically underrated), but most of the "Nine Inch Nails does arena rock" stuff I'm ambivalent towards. TR's unbelievably persistent ability to make cool weird sounds is still here and enough to keep you from ever forgetting it's an NIN record, but if you're not into arena-friendly rock music (which I once was, but am now very much not), it really comes across as a lesser version of Nine Inch Nails.

Didn't count Ghosts or Still, mainly because they're too hard to compare with the other records. Where could I possibly put Ghosts that wouldn't just be throwing it in a random spot? Still is mostly comprised of unplugged renditions of songs from the other records.

EDIT: Holy fuck that came out long-winded. I'm a gigantic goddamn dork.

[Strohbie]

Just for fun, here's mine:
1- The Fragile
2- The Downward Spiral
3- Trilogy
4- With Teeth
5- Broken
6- Hesitation Marks
7- The Slip
8- Year Zero
9- Pretty Hate Machine
10- Ghosts I-IV

There must be a math major on here who can throw together an algorithm to tally up our lists and make an ETS consensus on our favorites. Any takers?

[lightfoot_heavyhand]

Just for fun, here's mine:
There must be a math major on here who can throw together an algorithm to tally up our lists and make an ETS consensus on our favorites. Any takers?

I’d do it in SPSS if it weren’t for the difficulty of dealing with abnormalities in the source data. For instance, how to deal with the fact that some people have split up The Trilogy and ranked them separately while others just count them as a single entity.

[perterje]

Oh, let me try this:

1. The Fragile
   
2. Year Zero
   
3. The Downward Spiral
   
4. Not The Actual Events
   
5. With Teeth
   
6. Bad Witch
   
7. The Slip
   
8. Add Violence
   
9. Broken
   
10. Hesitation Marks
    
11. Ghosts I-IV
    
12. Pretty Hate Machine
    

[notsoprettynow]

But shit, man, "Less Than" just really doesn't sound like it belongs here, and it doesn't help that it's also relatively boring as far as NIN singles go.

i think i love you

[mauro995]

1- The Downward Spiral
2- The Fragile
3- NTAE/AV/BW
4- Year Zero
5- Broken
6- Hesitation Marks
7- Still
8- Ghosts
9- With Teeth
10- Pretty Hate Machine
11- The Slip

[use you up]

Broken
The Downward Spiral
The Fragile
Year Zero
NATE/AV/BW
The Slip
Ghosts
Hesitation Marks
Pretty Hate Machine
With Teeth

[thevoid99]

1. The Downward Spiral
2. The Fragile
3. Broken
4. Year Zero
5. Pretty Hate Machine
6. Bad Witch
7. Not the Actual Events
8. Add Violence
9. Still
10. Ghosts I-IV
11. Hesitation Marks
12. The Slip
13. With Teeth

[nmitchell86]

The Next NIN Album!
Broken/ Fixed/ Broken Movie
This One Is On Us - The Gift
Pretty Hate Machine
The Fragile/ Still/ And All That Could Have Been
The Downward Spiral/ Further Down The Spiral/ Closure
NTAE/ AV/ BW
With Teeth/ Beside You In Time
Year Zero Year/ Zero Remix
The Slip
Hesitation Marks
Ghost
All the HTDA
All the Soundtrack/ Score work

[Halo Infinity]

1. The Fragile
2. The Downward Spiral
3. Pretty Hate Machine
4. Broken
5. With Teeth
6. Year Zero
7. Hesitation Marks
8. Add Violence
9. Not The Actual Events
10. Bad Witch
11. And All That Could Have Been (Still)
12. Ghosts I-IV
13. The Slip

[K-Rice]

I'm breaking my list up between Albums and EPs because I want to. And I'm putting Bad Witch and Still in the EP section because it feels right. And I guess I'll do a remix list too just for the fuck of it.

Main Albums:
1. The Fragile
2. Year Zero
3. The Downward Spiral
4. With Teeth
5. Pretty Hate Machine
6. The Slip
7. Hesitation Marks

EPs:
1. Still
2. Add Violence
3. Broken
4. Not The Actual Events
5. Bad Witch

Remixes:
1. Year Zero Remixed
2. Things Falling Apart
3. Further Down The Spiral
4. Fixed
5. Perfect Drug Versions

My tastes have changed quite a bit over the years. Hesitation Marks in particular fell very far in my rankings since it's release while With Teeth seems to get better every time I listen to it. I didn't rank Ghosts or Fragile Deviations because they're so different from anything else, but they're two of my favorite releases and I own both of them on vinyl.

[caca]

As of this precise moment...

1. The Fragile
2. Year Zero
3. The Downward Spiral
4. Bad Witch
5. Not The Actual Events
6. Broken
7. Add Violence
8. Pretty Hate Machine
9. With Teeth
10. Hesitation Marks
12. Ghosts I-IV
13. The Slip

*I don’t dislike ANY of these albums. They all make my pants tighten.

[Reznorection]

1 The Downward Spiral
2. The Fragile
3. Broken
4. Pretty Hate Machine
5. Bad Witch

Don't really have any strong opinions after that.

[snaapz]

As of 10/15/2018

In order of what I could not live without...


1. The Fragile
2. TDS
3. PHM
4. Year Zero
5. With Teeth
6. Trilogy
7. The Slip
8. Broken/Fixed
9. Hesitation Marks
10. Still
11. Ghosts

[Steven]

Ranking after listening to all the albums over the last 2-3 weeks.

1. The Downward Spiral
2. The Fragile
3. BW/NTAE/AV
4. Hesitation Marks
5. With Teeth
6. Pretty Hate Machine
7. Year Zero
8. Broken
9. The Slip
10. Ghosts

[Halo Infinity]

My NIN fandom started with Marilyn Manson (I feel like this was a pretty common story among NIN fans in the late 90s?), when I learned that the guy who'd produced ACS was NIN. This caused my to seek out PHM (thinking that I should start from the beginning, as if a discography is like a book series or something, to be consumed in chronological order) and bounced off it pretty hard. It wasn't until about a year after that that someone basically forced TDS into my hands and I listened to it. TDS blew my mind. I remember saying "it's like my brain is a lock and I finally found the key!"

I almost completely forgot to reply to your post because my NIN fandom also started with Marilyn Manson. I also have that mentality regarding albums as well. (Although from the looks of it, you no longer do, and perhaps even gotten over it, but that's still certainly as such with me.) I know I don't have to listen to them in chronological order, but that overall habit/tendency stuck with me. It feels like I'm cheating, or skipping a season of a TV show. I know I don't have to do it that way though, and I'll admit that it's sometimes because to jump around the discography instead of listening to it in chronologically order, one by one. I could see how that could kill the fun, and just turn the hobby into a flat-out chore/burden.

One thing that seems to be down to a science though, at least with me, is to at the very least, check out the first 5-10 years of the discography at the very least, and 15 to 20 years at the most. However, in most cases, it's almost a guarantee that the first 5 to 10 years should still suffice for an introduction as far as bands/musicians albums go.

Oh, and I'm totally there with TDS being the key, especially after listening to ACSS. As a matter of fact, I constantly listened to ACSS and HW, so when I heard Broken and TDS for the first time, I'm like, "Holy shit! Go figure and no wonder that Nine Inch Nails is the guy that helped out Marilyn Manson big-time!"

And in hindsight, my friend at the time who go me to listen to NIN was absolutely right as constantly encouraging me to listen to NIN if I loved MM so much. He didn't impose his opinions or nag me either, but I'm so glad he kept telling me over and over to check out NIN, which didn't take too long. Hell never steered me wrong on music before, like ever anyway.

ACS also led me to a second revelation about NIN. Back then I was a penniless teenager, and stereos and discmen and such were much more expensive. So the only way I ever listened to music was on a shitty little stereo I had in my room. It wasn't until I was up really late studying one night, and my brother came and knocked on my door, told me to turn my damn music down so he could sleep, and thrust his discman into my hands. I was halfway through listening to ACS at the time, so I stuck it in the discman, skipped to the track I was up to, and listened to it on headphones for the first time. My mind was blown again, because I could suddenly hear that there was way more going on in the music than I'd ever noticed before. Of course, I put TDS on right after that. From that point on, I was headphones all the way with NIN.


I was super hyped for TF. I still have nostalgia for the cool snippets of music that were posted on nin.com in the lead up to the release. I rode my bike down to the music store on September 20 so I could be there at 9 am. I had to get the guy to go look in the back, then open up a cardboard box full of copies of TF. Then I rode straight home, told the family not to disturb me, turned off my lights, and strapped on the headphones. The experience is actually one of the fondest memories I have. TF remains the gold standard for products I was hyped for that actually lived up to the hype. Exceeded it, even.

I've got to say and really got to love how our first-time experiences listening to Nine Inch Nails are somehow identical in some ways. And while I still enjoy listening to NIN on speakers, it's always been headphones all the way for me as well.

All this is preamble to explain why I just don't really like WT. Because I can remember the six year wait between albums, when there was almost total silence from the NIN camp. It got to the point where I really started to believe that NIN were just done. Then WT was announced, and it seemed like a goddamned miracle. And when it came out I did the same thing - went straight to a music store, bought a copy, went home, turned off the lights, stuck in my headphones and...


...I found myself listening to what sounded to me like a middling rock album, with some very minor NIN flourishes. The incredible layers of sound were stripped away. A couple of the songs were solid rockers, but most of them just seemed kinda bland. (Actually, another total sidenote: something I'd forgotten until I was reading through the comments on this thread was that everyone's favourite song off WT seemed to be Sunspots. I've always found that really baffling, as I thought it wasn't just a bad song, but also a very un-NIN sounding song. People also seemed to hate the title track, which was the only song on the album I really loved.) I actually tried very hard to convince myself that I loved WT, but deep down I knew I didn't. I don't think I actually admitted it to myself until YZ came out. YZ was everything I'd wanted WT to be: new and totally different, but still unmistakably NIN. It was only once I had that confirmation that NIN were still the band I loved that I was able to let go of the lie I'd been telling myself about WT.


And the thing is, I've loved everything NIN has put out since then. WT is just this weird glitch in the discography for me. I've tried listening to it a bunch, to see if I would warm up to it the way I eventually warmed to PHM. But no. It never clicked.

As for me, With Teeth was easily and instant favorite of mine and it actually stood the test of time for me. As far as the albums I haven't been into as much as most of the other albums, that would have to go to Ghosts I-IV and The Slip. (Not to say that I think they're bad albums either, as I still have favorite songs from both of them, and granted, it's not really fair to Ghosts I-IV since it's an instrumental album, but those two are the least listened to NIN albums so far as a whole.)

[Steven]

1. The Downward Spiral
2. Broken
3. The Fragile
4. With Teeth
5. Not the Actual Events
6. Pretty Hate Machine
7. Add Violence
8. Year Zero
9. Bad Witch
10. The Slip
11. Hesitation Marks

Shoutout for your ranking of With Teeth and NTAE but where you put Hesitation Marks hurts to me

[nmitchell86]

I can't even rank nin albums... they are all soooo good. I guess Number one for me is the next album and number two is everything else.

[Halo Infinity]

I just thought of having a little fun with this and separate the run of Pretty Hate Machine to The Fragile and With Teeth to Hesitation Marks, and then Not The Actual Events to Bad Witch afterwards, as I sometimes like to divide eras whenever it comes to ranking albums. I also didn't include Still for this one, because I'm just leaving this for 1989-1999, so it'll have to sit that one out. However, should it be included, Still would easily be ranked at number 5.

While most of it has also remained the same, I actually surprised myself a bit after realizing that I was also listening to Hesitation Marks more than Year Zero and Bad Witch more than Not The Actual Events.

1. The Downward Spiral
2. The Fragile
3. Pretty Hate Machine
4. Broken

1. With Teeth
2. Hesitation Marks
3. Year Zero
4. Ghosts I-IV
5. The Slip

1. Add Violence
2. Bad Witch
3. Not The Actual Events