“Feels like I’ve been here before,” Trent Reznor sings on the new EP by Nine Inch Nails, and that’s probably because he has.
Released Friday, just a week after Reznor revealed he had made it, “Not the Actual Events” represents the latest in a series of comebacks for this influential industrial-rock band, which has spent the last decade shuttling between active duty and cold storage.
The five-song set also marks a return, following 2013’s controlled “Hesitation Marks,” to the bleak, pummeling sound that drove Nine Inch Nails to stardom in the early 1990s.
On “Hesitation Marks,” which itself spurred Reznor to revive Nine Inch Nails as a touring act after earlier swearing off the road, he concentrated on gleaming textures and relatively luscious grooves. The live band he put together behind the album featured bassist Pino Palladino, known for his collaboration with the soul singer D’Angelo, and one of Whitney Houston’s backup vocalists.
But “Not the Actual Events” opens with “Branches/Bones,” a brief blast of fuzzed-out guitars overlaid with sinister words about “spiders crawling everywhere” and “pieces with the opening sewed shut.” In “Burning Bright (Field on Fire),” the guitars get bigger and more serrated, ultimately cresting in a wave that drowns out Reznor’s voice.
The music is still carefully constructed. Reznor recorded “Not the Actual Events” with Atticus Ross, his partner in the high-profile film-score work he started doing during one of Nine Inch Nail’s breaks. Together they won an Oscar in 2011 for “The Social Network” and went on to score other movies, including this month’s “Patriots Day.”
The two also play in How to Destroy Angels, another on-again/off-again outfit they share with Reznor’s wife, singer Mariqueen Maandig.
Here you can sense their attention to detail in “Dear World,” with a machine-tooled drum track that keeps shifting to emphasize unexpected beats, and “She’s Gone Away,” which features Maandig singing in ghostly harmony with Reznor, her voice nearly imperceptible in the mix.
Yet the EP’s impact is blunt, as the band itself was quick to proclaim in a statement announcing its release. “It’s an unfriendly, fairly impenetrable record that we needed to make,” Reznor said.
