Trent Reznor sure as hell doesn’t waste time. He hit the ground running after breaking his major label chains last year, writing and recording a massive amount of new material in a grueling ten week recording session shortly thereafter. The result, with zero fanfare and by total surprise is Ghosts I-IV, a new Nine Inch Nails album.
Ghosts I-IV is a massive, 36-song instrumental “soundtrack for daydreams,” as Reznor puts it, and on first listen I’d say it stands strong with the best in the NIN catalog. The songs range from quiet piano tracks riddled with synth beats and bursts of futuristic industrial grinding to pulsing, neon, beautiful dissonance and reflective, pensive soundscapes. It’s unmistakably Reznor, but Ghosts I-IV pushes the boundaries of what we’ve come to expect from him under the NIN moniker. He’s just using more color.
It’s fucking beautiful.
You can download the first 9 songs for free here, or you can get all 36 tracks for five bucks. There’s also a $10 double-disc CD set that includes a 16-page booklet, or a $75 package that includes two discs, a DVD and a deluxe book. And if you’ve got $300 to burn, a signed limited-edition set is available.
Options are good. And of course, it’s all DRM-free.
Yeah, this shit is good. It’s really good.
This widget is supposed to provide an audio preview of Ghosts I-IV:
But the embed code provided by nin.com doesn’t seem to work in any browsers we have handy.
A working version can be found here: http://ghosts.nin.com
UPDATE (3/5/08): The player works now. Cool.
March 4th, 2008 at 11:27 AM
you know what i say?
if you’re going to sell online, do it somewhere people are already familiar with, such as itunes or amazon. don’t do it through your site, which noone’s ever used before. and anyway, if you’re a popular band like nine inch nails, your servers probably will buckle under the traffic (like nin.com did when this one dropped).
when i heard this “album” got released, i immediately went to nin.com- but nothing came up because the servers were being slammed. i then went to itunes to check it out (and likely purchase it), but the album wasn’t listed there.
so i fired up xtorrent, and stole the album.
trent of all people should understand that convenience is king in the new music industry.
also, their cool little viral promotional widget doesn’t work.
fail.
March 4th, 2008 at 5:23 PM
The guy made a 36-track album in 10 weeks, released it with absolutely ZERO promotion of any kind. It sold so fast that it crashed servers, not to mention completely selling out of 2,500 copies of a $300 version of that album.
“Fail”? I double dog dare you to do better.
March 4th, 2008 at 9:36 PM
fail on the promotional widget, which i’ve made tons of… all of which have worked perfectly on other servers, because i understand basic flash security.
of course he gets props for finishing and selling this “album,” but we all know crazy nin fans will buy anything with a halo number. there’s some cool noises on the thing, but it didn’t blow my skirt up. sounds like a bunch of cool sounding scraps thrown together over 10 weeks.