[Author’s note: This is the second of two nearly finished drafts that sat unpublished while I was busy relocating overseas for the past couple months. Better late than never, and who cares?]

“Have to say I woke up this morning with a big cloud over my head. Thanks, I needed this.” Trent Reznor’s only words to the crowd other than naming the rest of his band struck me as ironic after a night of songs wallowing in depression and despair. But Nine Inch Nails is about purging these feelings.

Since the late 1980s, Nine Inch Nails (NIN) has carried the flag of industrial rock, marrying heavy metal riffs with ambient soundscapes, electronic beats, and unorthodox percussion that sounds like machines churning in a factory. Trent Reznor, the band’s founder and sole permanent member until the last decade, has blossomed from a multi-instrumentalist king of gloom into a Grammy, Golden Globe, and Academy Award-winning composer and producer. Outside of NIN, you can hear his work in the scores of films like The Social Network and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, TV series like Watchmen, and video games like Quake.

Because it’s largely one person’s brainchild, I had always thought of Nine Inch Nails as mostly a studio entity, like Steely Dan. This concert taught me that the band pays incredible attention to detail in live performances. 

Entering the Barclays Center felt like stepping into a nightclub from a vampire movie. Dim blood-red lights covered the floor, with the rest of the arena shrouded in darkness. I struggled to adjust my ears—still ringing from seeing Oasis just two nights earlier—to the hard-hitting club beats of German-Iraqi DJ Boys Noize. A handful of people in front of his podium swayed and danced timidly, while most stood motionless. At the center of the floor sat a giant cube wrapped in a black curtain.

As the opening act wound down his electronic cacophony, the curtain over the cube fell to reveal Reznor at an acoustic piano on a small platform. “See the animal in his cage that you built / are you sure which side you’re on?” asked the opening song, fitting for a solo performance enclosed by fans on all sides. Each tentative note rang out so clearly you could’ve heard a pin drop in the audience.

Other members of NIN slowly climbed onto the platform as the intensity grew: first multi-instrumentalist Alessandro Cortini, then electronics specialist Atticus Ross (the only full-time band member besides Reznor), and finally veteran guitarist Robin Finck. At the fuzzed out climax of “Piggy (Nothing Can Stop Me Now)”, a booming drum solo from Josh Freese burst through the speakers and a projection of him playing appeared on a giant curtain at the back of the arena, snapping everyone’s attention away from the platform.

Before the audience had time to realize what was happening, the curtain lifted to reveal the whole band on a larger stage with Freese launching into some of NIN’s heaviest rock songs, starting with “Wish.” I expected to feel people nearby stomping the floor and jostling around, but maybe “no new tale to tell / 26 years and on my way to hell” doesn’t resonate as much when sung by a 60-year old to a middle-aged audience. 

Unlike Oasis, this photogenic performance was meant to be spectated not participated in. When Reznor dropped the guitar to sing, he tilted the microphone stand dramatically, allowing his image to be cast in magic mirror angles across three curtains behind the band, as if the shadows of himself were differently shaped backup singers.

The highlight of the evening for me was a menacing version of “Reptile.” Seizure-inducing blinkers shot out from the walls in sync to the music, and a white wire fence scrolled over the perimeter each time a synthesizer produced a reptilian screech. A cameraman paced the stage filming the musicians, which projected in black and white onto the curtains.

This set also included the surging and militaristic “March of the Pigs,” whose lyrics are the source of this Peel It Back Tour’s name. Out of context, “Peel It Back” might sound like a revisiting of the band’s formative years. Indeed, the lion’s share of the setlist came from the iconic 1994 breakthrough The Downward Spiral. But in the song, it’s a peeling back of the performer’s own skin to share his inner trauma with consumers eager to lap it up.

Bathed in crimson glow and decaying distortion at the end of a maniacally aggressive “Gave Up,” Reznor and Ross snuck back to the center platform, where they were joined by opening act DJ Boys Noize. A square emitting multi-colored light beams lowered over the trio, as they fired up their synthesizers and turntables for a short set of more electronic-oriented numbers driven by pulsing dance beats. “Closer,” probably the signature NIN song, sported an infectiously funky bass groove as the staccato treble of keyboards spiraled towards the ceiling.

“Oh, heeellllll yeah!” someone behind me shouted as a snaky ascending chromatic line announced “Somewhat Damaged,” the only track performed all night from 1999’s The Fragile. Reznor and Ross rejoined their bandmates back on the main stage for a final set featuring some of the biggest hits that didn’t fit one of the earlier categories. It wasn’t until “Head Like a Hole,” the opening track off NIN’s 1989 debut album, that the audience finally came alive, fists in the air chanting along to the defiant chorus, as strobe lights offered glimpses of crowdsurfers near the stage.

The show ended, as it began, with a delicate piano-based ballad. Reznor’s silhouetted face moved in and out of clarity on the backdrop curtains to the eerie confessions of “Hurt.” The song culminated in an abrupt blast of distorted guitar, leaving a trail of feedback that sounded like being sucked down an endless vacuum tube. The band exited, curtains closed, and the house lights came on as the feedback persisted for another five minutes. 

Referencing the performer’s baring their soul before a hungry audience, the lyric giving name to the tour asks, “take the skin and peel it back / now doesn’t it make you feel better?” It did. This concert lifted Reznor out of his own gloom, and I found that my Oasis hangover had been banished. The placid audience too was full of smiles and superlative comments as we walked out the doors.