12 Things Only Nine Inch Nails Fans Would Understand

9. The Importance Of Halo Numbers

It's like Mr. Reznor somehow knew that his fans were going to be a bunch of voracious band-nerds. Why else would he dream up a custom-built categorisation system for all the official NIN albums, remix mash-ups, singles and live recordings, if not to give us just another thing to fret over? Surely he could have just flung these new releases at us, one after the other, like everyone else? No, he had to attach a Halo number to each, thereby making it impossible to miss one release without leaving a huge, obvious, gaping hole in our collections. You can't just shove your NIN albums into your CD rack wherever you find a slot. You need to reshuffle your Michael Learns To Rock and Spandau Ballet albums to clear some space, find a worthy spot for you prized Ricky Martin "Livin la Vida Loca" special edition - you may actually need a special shelf just for Trent's masterpieces so that they can run uninterrupted from Halo 1 (Down In It) to Halo 28DCD (Hesitation Marks Deluxe Edition). It will sound rather silly to most people, but for us these numbers and their sequence is ridiculously important. And don't think you can get away with just covering 1 to 28... some releases have sub-Halos - The Downward Spiral, for example, comes in three flavours: standard vanilla (Halo 8), funky chocolate Deluxe Edition (Halo 8 DE) and super delicious caramel crunch DualDisc Edition (Halo 8 DVD-A). If it all comes across as a bit obsessive, that's because it is.