Bad Witch

With Bad Witch, Reznor and Ross have proven their staying power as one of heavy music’s most formidable outfits, honoring their roots while looking forward into bold, new transcendent territory.

The transitions are what make the thing, equally as important as the actual songs here. Bad Witch finds Trent at a rare peak in terms of song flow and focus, and as a piece is absolutely deserving of the LP distinction, brutally short runtime be damned.

On Bad Witch, Trent Reznor has curated a feeling, an atmosphere, an idea.

Bad Witch has a more palpable vein of nihilism coursing through it than perhaps any Nine Inch Nails release since the seminal The Downward Spiral.

There are echoes of If They Move, Kill ’Em-era Primal Scream given an industrial makeover and God Break Down the Door adds skittering rhythms to that template. The final two tracks are more sombre, particularly closer Over and Ou.

A sense of cosmic ambiguity permeates Bad Witch. These are neither his most inviting new songs nor his most immediate, but they rank among his most urgent.

This is NIN revitalised with Reznor’s thirst for chaos truly quenched.

Across the sixteen tracks that make up this entire project they’ve by and large avoided the awkward moments that have made listeners cringe on previous releases, they’ve finally nailed how to produce and mix Reznor’s voice so that his still somewhat heavy-handed lyricism doesn’t distract attention from the considerable craft that’s gone into the music, and they’ve found a way to organically explore new sonic avenues which mean that, while Reznor might feel like he’s trapped in a loop, doomed to continually find himself back where he’s already been, Nine Inch Nails are no longer simply repeating themselves.

Production-wise, the album sounds amazing, every multilayered arrangement and synth tone calibrated for maximum headphone-listening pleasure. ... Reznor is still making records that crackle with restless energy.

[Trent has] ended up somewhere unique, exciting, and genuinely of his own making. [16 Jun 2018, p.57]

Thirty years in NIN sound reinvigorated. [Summer 2018, p.116]

While he denies us simple solutions, he uses this album to open sounds and atmospheres stranger and more daring than he’s used before. Rather than looking for answers, maybe the questions are what truly matter.

While never quite holding together as a set, NIN continues to admirably cover new ground while doing what they do best, namely reflecting humanity’s worst impulses.

Play The Goddamned Part sounds like an annihilated sci-fi war zone haunted by the ghosts of nightclubs and patrolled by warbots constructed from the shrapnel of jazz saxophones. The more ambient I’m Not From This World feels like sticking your head into an alien death race’s knackered fusion drive and getting a face full of proton beam. Elsewhere, remnants of rock’n’roll survive the sonic desecration. ... It all reflects the corrosion of the millennial age, personal, political and ecological.

As the band looks back upon three decades of pain and rage, Reznor and Ross leave the sonic bread crumbs and callback allusions to the first two installments, advancing with fresh and surprising new possibilities for the coming era of Nine Inch Nails.

While 2016's Not the Actual Events explores dissociative identities and 2017's Add Violence brims with paranoia about our increasingly simulated reality, Bad Witch moves past such insular anxieties and more directly acknowledges that society's chaos is the result of our collective hubris. ... Reznor conveys a bleaker and more visceral sense of desperation on the album's two instrumental tracks.