Nine Inch Nails Darkens Ball Arena With Gen X Nostalgia

"Man, they were nihilists, man. They kept saying they believed in nothing," The Dude exasperatedly exclaims to Donny and Walter at the bowling alley bar in the famous scene from The Big Lebowski. "Nihilists?" Walter responds. "Fuuuck me."

They could be talking about Nine Inch Nails, Trent Reznor's industrial rock outfit that dropped the album Pretty Hate Machine with its electro-thump single "Head Like a Hole" way back in 1989. Reznor became Generation X's poet laureate of nihilism and angst — 1994's The Downward Spiral, which opens with "Mr. Self Destruct" and includes the dirty funk of "Closer" and the tortured ballad "Hurt," stands as NIN's singularly dismal magnum opus.

As the meme goes, Reznor is the inversion of Rick Astley: He will give you up/He will let you down/He will run around and hurt you/He will tell you lies/He will say goodbye/He will run around and desert you.

The black-clad crowd at Ball Arena in Friday, August 15, for the Denver installment of Nine Inch Nails' Peel It Back Tour, largely composed of Xers (some with their college-aged kids) and millennials amped up on Coors Banquet Beer, reveled in sharing Reznor's existential dread during the band's nearly two-hour set.

Huge black curtains created cubes around a twenty-foot square central stage and the much bigger and strobier main stage. Reznor first appeared on the smaller stage playing the acoustic piano and crooning, "What if all the world's inside your head?/Just creations of your own/Your devils and your gods, all the living and the dead/And you're really all alone."

Reznor's voice is still quicksilver — to borrow from Apocalypse Now, in his baritone one hears a snail crawl along the edge of a straight razor. The band, including Reznor's composing partner Atticus Ross, joined him on the small stage for "Ruiner" and "Piggy (Nothing Can Stop Me Now)," before they raced through a roped-off corridor in the floor crowd to the main stage to launch into "Wish" from the 1992 Broken EP.

A cameraman circled and zoomed onstage around the band, with his feed projected in white on massive black curtains in stuttered frames-per-second while huge strobes assaulted the crowd's pupils. The light show was impressive, but I found myself closing my eyes in the face of its intensity — this is Nine Inch Nails, I thought; it's probably supposed to hurt. It's likely the last show I'll be without earplugs, as well.

Nine Inch Nails' performance was mechanically tight, the set list mirroring those of other dates on the tour, and everyone onstage following the script to a tee — it wasn't the raw Nine Inch Nails of the '90s, but the act's polished ease with this precision was silvery and fluid like mercury.

Fans got the hits they came for: "Closer," "The Hand That Feeds," "Head Like a Hole" and "Hurt" in the final main stage quarter of the show. Overall, the middle-aged darkcore experience felt appropriate for this era in America: a penned-in crowd of thousands screaming their angst along with Reznor as he pleads the same panic he's been agonizing over for thirty years.