- Record Label: The Null Corporation
- Release Date: Dec 23, 2016
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Jul 11, 2017Not the Actual Events is one of the greatest Nine Inch Nails releases ever.
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Kerrang!Jan 11, 2017Throughout, NIN strike a masterful balance between drilling industrial assaults and eerie ambience. [14 Jan 2017, p.52]
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Jan 11, 2017In 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. And after 28 years, we’re still excited to see what comes next.
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Jan 10, 2017Not The Actual Events serves as an excellent primer for what is to come. But more importantly, and more pressingly, 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.
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Jan 4, 2017Not The Actual Events is everything we would expect from Reznor and Ross, offering textures we’ve never visited and contexts with conscience.
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Jan 3, 2017You can sense their attention to detail in “Dear World,” with a machine-tooled drum track that keeps shifting to emphasize unexpected beats, and “She’s Gone Away,” which features Maandig singing in ghostly harmony with Reznor, her voice nearly imperceptible in the mix.
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Jan 3, 2017The fairly impenetrable wall of sound Nine Inch Nails created here is admirable, especially since everything is presented in just over 21 minutes.
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Jan 3, 2017Just when you thought Reznor and his obscenely large biceps had been plugging away far too long on what was essentially a Nine Inch Nails tribute act, he sets things straight again with an original, well-produced, no-bullshit record. More of this please, and less of that other stuff.
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Jan 3, 2017Not the Actual Events is probably the grimiest Nine Inch Nails release since The Fragile. Rather than running the gamut between overdriven steamrolling and receding, glitchy ambience as on most of the work Reznor loosed between 1994 and 2008, the EP realizes a specific, portentous mood from several equivalent angles.
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Jan 3, 2017Even 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.
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Jan 3, 2017The blip-bloops and motorik groove of “Dear World”, could’ve easily slotted in as one of the better tracks on Hesitation Marks, and then there’s the contrast between hearing the digital diary entries in the verses of “The Idea of You” with the exploding choruses (aided by Dave Grohl). But nothing here is truly great.
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Jan 3, 2017Not the Actual Events turns out to be so slight, at just five tracks with no dramatic shift in form. It’s the least essential non-instrumental album the band has released.
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Jan 3, 2017Rather 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.
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Jan 3, 2017The 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.
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Jan 3, 2017Between the abundant déja vu and the periodical redundancy (doldrums which would be easy enough to overlook on a full-length, but prove problematic on a brisk 21-minute listen like this), Not the Actual Events’ purported “impenetrability” manifests as a riotous retread instead.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 43 out of 48
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Mixed: 5 out of 48
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Negative: 0 out of 48
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Mar 1, 2018
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Oct 18, 2017
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Jan 5, 2017This review contains spoilers, click full review link to view.