“The Downward Spiral” Breakdown: An Introduction
This is, unequivocally, the absolute greatest album of all time. You can fight me on that, I don’t care because I know I’m right. And to prove that I’m right, I’m going to do an in-depth, complete lyrical analysis/interpretation of each song as well as musical analysis: at least as far as I can with one whole high school music theory class under my belt. I’m going to be releasing an article on one song at a time, as often as I can, until I’ve got one out there for all fourteen tracks on the album. This right here is the introduction, and I’ll be writing a conclusion after it’s all done to finish it off right. Here we go.
The Downward Spiral (A.K.A. halo 8) was released March 8th, 1994 by the then-one-man Rock ‘N Roll Hall of Fame winning group Nine Inch Nails to commercial and critical success. It was their second full-length effort, after the release of their 1989 album Pretty Hate Machine and 1992 EP Broken, both of which have become classics over the years. A concept album, it deals with a protagonist slowly losing everything until he has nothing left to lose; the lyrics are very open-ended, however, utilizing metaphors and double-entendres to grant the listener multiple interpretations behind the meanings of the songs and the narrative of the album. In this series of articles, I’ll be giving a few of my own interpretations, but I highly encourage you to listen to the album for yourself and find your own interpretation of the story.
In addition to lyrical themes, the album employs many sonic themes as well, utilizing time signatures, motifs, dyads, key changes, and more in an effort to create an increasingly depressing tone of disaffection, nihilism, loss, anger, and ultimate nothingness (mental and physical). The reason I love this album so much and will never stop giving it praise is because the music and lyrics are both fantastically performed on their own, but compliment each other in a way I’ve honestly never heard done better, even in Trent Reznor’s later work.
The album’s artwork, a collection of mixed-media works by Russel Mills, grant the piece yet another layer of depth to its meaning and compilation. The front cover of the album, titled “Wound”, is a beautifully dark amalgamation of oil, pastel, blood, dead insects, bandaging, metals, acrylics, and more, that give an unsettling yet not disturbing feeling. It’s actually one of my favorite works of all time, because there’s something peaceful about it somehow. As Russel described it in his 2006 article Committere he wanted to “make works that alluded to the apparently contradictory imagery of pain and healing”, and I personally think that that mindset of the piece perfectly encapsulates the meaning of the album. He made many other works of art for the album which I will add for extra context whenever applicable.
I’ll be going over each track in the order they appear on the album:
Thanks for reading, and I hope you check the rest of these whenever I release them (you’ll know as soon as I do if you subscribe, though, so y’know, try that out if you want). I’d also like to thank and give shout-out to Eva’s article on Taylor Swift’s Folklore album, a very interesting and well-written analysis/ranking of the work that inspired me to write about the music I really like (I’m not personally into Taylor’s music that much but the article was so damn good I actually gave the album a listen afterwards). You can check that out right now with this handy-dandy link right here: https://medium.com/@evar1/folklore-breakdown-ranking-4252ed5286e9. And you can also give them a follow too while you’re at it.
