It was only mid-February when Nine Inch Nails released Ghosts I-IV, 36 acoustic tracks put on the internet for a free download. Now, less than 3 months later, Reznor has given his fans The Slip, a 10-track album filled with mostly compact, angry music.

Again, the album is free. Like all free things that are worth your while, though, it doesn’t suck. The first half of the album features several three-to-five minute songs full of hard drums, steady guitars and the dissonance anyone who knows anything about Nine Inch Nails loves very much. The album’s first single, Discipline, sounds a lot like singles off of his two previous record label albums, Year Zero and With Teeth, while the standard slow-song-not-filled-with-hate, Corona Radiata, reminds the listener of plenty of the serene NIN stuff of years past.

If there’s any fault of the album, it’s that The Slip doesn’t break new ground musically. Sure, the free download and the promotion of filesharing are nice, but until this point in the NIN discography it was pretty easy to chart new ground for Reznor. Here, it seems his music has stagnated a bit, which is way more terrifying than anything Trent Reznor has ever wrote.

Download:
1,000,000, Discipline, Demon Seed

Sounds like:
Trent Reznor?

Listen to it when:
You want to get lost in some fun dystopian angst.