Studio albums 8 Video albums 3 EPs 5 | Live albums 1 Music videos 29 Singles 14 | |
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American industrial rock band Nine Inch Nails have released eight studio albums, one live album, three remix albums, one box set, five extended plays, 14 singles, 13 promotional singles, four video albums and 29 music videos. Nine Inch Nails has also contributed to numerous film soundtracks as well as the soundtrack to the video game Quake.
Contents
Initial ambitions for Nine Inch Nails in 1988 were to release one 12-inch single on a small European label. With the addition of future singles "Head Like a Hole" and "Sin", many of these demo tracks would later appear in revised form on Pretty Hate Machine in 1989, an album co-produced by Adrian Sherwood and Mark "Flood" Ellis which peaked at number 75 in 1990. In response to pressures from TVT Records for a follow-up to Nine Inch Nails' commercially successful debut, Reznor began recording the Broken extended play in secret. The EP was released in 1992 and reached the top 10 on the Billboard 200. Nine Inch Nails' second studio album, The Downward Spiral, entered the Billboard 200 in 1994 at number two, sold over four million copies in the US and remains the highest-selling Nine Inch Nails release in the United States.
Five years elapsed before Nine Inch Nails' next major album, The Fragile, a double album that debuted at number one on the Billboard 200, selling 228,000 copies in its first week, but dropped from the top 10 afterward. Another six years elapsed before Nine Inch Nails' next studio album, With Teeth, which also debuted at the top of the Billboard 200. In 2007, the band released Year Zero alongside an accompanying alternate reality game. Reznor announced in late 2007 that Nine Inch Nails had fulfilled its contractual obligations with Interscope Records, and would distribute its next major album independently. The last Interscope release from Nine Inch Nails was a remix album based on material from Year Zero. The first Nine Inch Nails album released independently was the instrumental Ghosts I–IV in 2008, followed two months later by The Slip. Hesitation Marks was released through Columbia Records on August 30, 2013. After teasing a release earlier that year, Reznor released the EP Not the Actual Events on December 23, 2016.
Chronology
Each official Nine Inch Nails release is chronologically ordered with a sequential number prefixed by the word "Halo". For example, the fifth Nine Inch Nails release, Broken, is identified with the phrase "Halo Five". These numbers are sometimes modified for alternate versions of a release, such as the multiple releases of The Downward Spiral. Promotional-only releases do not have their own numbers, although the promotional singles for "Piggy" and "Hurt" were both labeled as "Halo Ten", a title later officially used for Further Down the Spiral. A US promo for "Into the Void" is mislabeled as Halo 16 because this number actually belongs to the Things Falling Apart remix album.
Music videos
Broken, the unreleased short film directed by Peter Christopherson, contains the videos for "Pinion", "Wish", and "Happiness in Slavery" as well as a video for "Help Me I am in Hell" and a different video for "Gave Up" than the one on Closure. The short film contains graphic depictions of a seemingly helpless victim being tortured and forced to watch Nine Inch Nails videos.