Nine Inch Nails

Not the Actual Events

The fairly impenetrable wall of sound Nine Inch Nails created here is admirable, especially since everything is presented in just over 21 minutes.

Not The Actual Events is everything we would expect from Reznor and Ross, offering textures we’ve never visited and contexts with conscience.

It sounds like Reznor working in the studio like no one is watching, shouting to himself, punching random synthesizers. It’s an artist free of any unnecessary expectations. In that way it’s very reminiscent The Fragile, perhaps the most creative body of work by the project.

It asks more questions and takes more risks than any welcome back should. It’s not a postcard of a legendary past, its a battlecry for something truly epic to come.

In five tracks and just over 20 minutes, Not The Actual Events manages to build on Nine Inch Nails' past while stepping resolutely into their future. 

Nine Inch Nails brings industrial rock back with a vengeance with this new EP.

Better than 2013’s Hesitation Marks I think, mostly ‘cuz it’s shorter.

Even with its moments of flawed excess, Not The Actual Events is so full of new ideas compared to the relatively “this again?” nature of Hesitation Marks or The Slip that it deserves its place in the NIN catalog.

Nine Inch Nails’ surprise-release new EP Not the Actual Events is slight, but at moments it delivers the kind of visceral fury that NIN hasn’t recreated since its mid-’90s Downward Spiral heyday.

Rather than offering a bold new step in Reznor's long, winding career, Not the Actual Events feels more like tentative first steps towards something bigger.

The burst of primal aggression is welcome (especially in today's political climate), but this EP is too meandering and amorphous to hit as hard as the band’s best stuff.

No matter how urgent its creators’ intent, no matter how explosive its highlights, Not the Actual Events stands, alas, as a pyre dependent on the kindling of nostalgia, as opposed to innovation.