Tier List: Nine Inch Nails Albums & EPs

I've recently gotten into Anthony Fantano's music reviews on YouTube. Let me rephrase that: I'm not so much glued to his album reviews as I am interested in his videos where he talks about general music trends and entire band discographies. This includes his Tier Lists in which he ranks all of a band's albums into tiers based on quality. This inspired me to do one of my own. I chose Nine Inch Nails because not only is it one of my favourite bands but it's also a band that has a large and diverse discography. For this ranking I've listed all fifteen of NIN's studio albums and EPs; live albums and remixes don't count. So let me explain in detail what this means.

• S Tier: They way I see it, an S-tier album is an exceptional album, one that is most essential to knowing an artist. I believe only one NIN album meets this criteria and it should come as no surprise that that album is 1994's The Downward Spiral. Straight from the pain factory comes a dramatic, machine-generated descent into anxiety and depression that isn't exactly easy to listen to. While it isn't for everyone, TDS is well-paced, heavily textured, and memorable.
• A Tier: To me an A-tier album is excellent, something no true fan should be without. One of them is this band's debut album, Pretty Hate Machine, a 48-minute sample of dark synthpop/machine rock whose hooky songwriting and defiant-yet-celebratory tone brought some mainstream appeal to industrial music. The other is 1999's The Fragile, a grandiose double album that offers a lot in the way of textured soundscapes – 7 of its 23 songs are instrumentals – but represents an evolution of NIN's sound and themes rather than a revolution. It wasn't quite as good as TDS but it was a damn good effort.
• B Tier: Next up we have the albums that I consider to be very good and by coincidence they all happen to be EPs. The band's first EP, Broken, is a focused buzz saw of intense rage and ferocity. It's as metal as the band ever got and it catapulted NIN into public consciousness. On the other end of the spectrum is Still, a toned-down set of eight songs some new and some deconstructed remakes of older NIN songs. I would argue that Still is a hidden gem in the Nine Inch Nails discography, the fulcrum around which the band's tone has matured. The other two are the first and third of the EP Trilogy (2016-18), Not the Actual Events and Bad Witch, respectively. NTAE is exciting for bringing back a bit of hard rocking aggression that NIN fans hadn't seen in years and Bad Witch features some ominous dread with its interesting arrangements (which even includes some saxophone!).
• C Tier: This tier is what I consider pretty good, above-average work. Starting it off is 2005's With Teeth, which is more focused yet less daring than The Fragile. Despite this it still has some great songs and remains one of my favourites. Next is The Slip, a lean, straightforward industrial rock album that's easy to enjoy. NIN's following release, Hesitation Marks, sounds like an amalgamation of all that came before it but with a more mature – even hopeful – tone. Rounding out this tier is the band's most recent release (from two weeks ago), Ghosts VI: Locusts, an instrumental album of dark, anxious background music. It's a genre that Nine Inch Nails has become quite at home with.
• D tier: Lastly we have the D-tier, albums that I consider OK or average. The first amongst them is 2007's Year Zero. I find Year Zero, NIN's second concept album, to be an alright listening experience but there's not much that makes it standout. One year later the band released Ghosts I-IV, a sprawling instrumental album full of 36 brief untitled songs. While it does have a handful of catchy tracks, most of the album is kind of boring. Things are mostly the same with the 2017 EP Add Violence. The difference is that Add Violence only has about 3 ho-hum songs on it instead of 28! Lastly there's the 2020 instrumental album Ghosts V: Together. It's the lighter, gentler companion to Locusts, but NIN has always been better at making listeners feel uncomfortable.