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critics' view

Nine Inch Nails achieve a new kind of loud on The Downward Spiral: accessible hard-rock moves overlaid with a scrim of electronic racket, white noise, screams, the kind of blown-speaker rattle that seems to use the limitations of crappy stereo equipment the way that Hendrix riffed on the distortion that howled from overdriven Marshall stacks. It’s a new frontier in rock & roll: music that pins playback levels far into the red. You have only two options with this album: Play it too softly, or play it too loud.

read Jonathon Gold's full review at Rolling Stone external-link.png

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