10 Greatest One Man Band Albums
7. Pretty Hate Machine - Nine Inch Nails
Most of these one man projects often focus on the final product than the showmanship behind the playing. No matter how clean you want each song to feel, it's more about serving the composition than just saying "look what I can do" across every instrument you can think of. It's one thing to just write a song...it's another to build mini horror movies from the ground up.
Long before Nine Inch Nails was really an idea, Pretty Hate Machine was the lynchpin for what became Trent Reznor's career going forward. Being the genius behind each sound, Reznor really puts you through the emotional ringer on every single track on the record, being as much informed by the balls to the wall metal of Judas Priest as he is to the cold and calculated melancholy of the Cure or Depeche Mode.
As such, you get an album that is almost two-faced in its presentation, having ragers like Terrible Lie put up against intimate looks into Reznor's troubled mind like on Something I Can Never Have. Not only would this become the sound of industrial to come, but also the beginnings of even darker passages to come on the Downward Spiral. Aside from just writing the thoughts in his head, Pretty Hate Machine is a look into Trent Reznor's psyche just before it hits a brick wall.