10 Perfect '90s Rock Albums That Are Ridiculously Long

As Nine Inch Nails reached the top of the music world, Trent Reznor was not really in the best frame of mind. Though The Downward Spiral made for a brilliant concept album and turned Closer into one of the biggest songs of the era, being thrusted into the limelight made Trent bottle himself up even more, becoming much more lonely than he had felt before he was playing sold out shows. Then again, since Mr. Self Destruct was meant to be the more vicious side of Trent, The Fragile is what happens when that line between character and creation start to blur.

Working as a great companion piece to Spiral, The Fragile is a much more intense undertaking, showing Trent at his absolute lowest emotionally and writing the kind of songs that capitalize on the industrial side of his sound. Using his struggles with fame as a sort of fuel, Trent uses both of these discs to kind of make sense of where he is at the time, from unleashing venom on Courtney Love in Starf*ckers Inc. to finding some sort of companionship on We're In This Together.

There are even some clever callbacks to what Trent had done before, including using the same keyboard riff that was sprinkled throughout Spiral and updating it slightly in different parts of this record. The Downward Spiral may have been more psychological horror, but the Fragile is the turn towards something a little more disturbed.