The Fragile
| Nine Inch Nails
The Fragile
The Fragile is the third studio album by American industrial rock band Nine Inch Nails, released as a double album on September 21, 1999, by Nothing and Interscope Records. It was produced by Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor and longtime collaborator Alan Moulder. It was recorded throughout 1997 to 1999 in New Orleans.-Wikipedia
Critic Reviews
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Pitchfork
In its newly remastered and rereleased incarnation, Trent Reznor's 1999 magnum opus The Fragile scrapes the sky like never before. Its companion, a reworking called Deviations 1, is mostly a curio.
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Louder
A double-disc beast, The Fragile is arguably the most widespread representation of Nine Inch Nails you’ll ever get in one piece of work; Starfuckers, Inc. carries on that brief dalliance with full-on metal explored on the Broken EP, No, You Don’t is almost a Pretty Hate Machine reprise and We’re In This Together is a full-blown anthem of solidarity. There was a hint of the industrial sound from NIN's previous albums, but with The Fragile, Trent evolved his band's sound to include layers of ambient noises, pushing towards art rock as opposed to the alternate rock of the band’s previous works.
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Spin
A half hour longer than most horror movies, offering no pause for breath between its intricate, echoing tracks, the two-CD The Fragile is a good old-fashioned strap-on-your-headphones experience. It might be called a concept album, except Reznor is too self-possessed to need such affectations.
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NIN
The album features a rich array of electronic beats, ambient noise, and heavy guitar. While it received critical acclaim from many, it did not receive the commercial success that its predecessor, The Downward Spiral, did (attributed variously to the difference in musical climate, and insufficient promotion by Interscope Records).
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Stereogum
Reznor had to know that this was a possibility. He went to work on The Fragile while mired deep in depression, using all the tricks at his disposal to capture whatever was going on in his head. He marshaled all his considerable resources, bringing in an all-star team of collaborators. The Fragile is probably the only album to feature production work from both Steve Albini and Dr. Dre. Other contributors included King Crimson’s Adrien Belew, Pink Floyd producer Bob Ezrin, My Bloody Valentine producer Alan Moulder, Helmet’s Page Hamilton, Skinny Puppy’s Dave Ogilvie, Chic’s Tony Thompson. Reznor had access to pretty much every living headphones-music master, and it seems like he called most of them.
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UDiscover
The Fragile also had moments of fire and fury, such as ‘Starf__kers, Inc’, but produced nothing that achieved the mainstream rock anthem status of the likes of The Downward Spiral’s ‘March Of The Pigs’. But appeasing people has never been Trent’s game, and that wasn’t The Fragile’s aim at all. As such, the success and legacy of this album is something of a hot talking point.
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Loudwire
Though not the commercial success of its predecessor, the album did debut at No. 1 and was certified double platinum. It also yielded four singles. The first was "The Day the World Went Away," a haunting slow build of a track utilizing piano, but that was conspicuously free of drums. The track would grow on listeners, as it became the band's first Top 40 hit, peaking at No. 17.
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All Music
The Fragile lives up to its title once the first disc is over. There are some detours into noisy bluster (some, like the Marilyn Manson dis "Starfuckers, Inc.," work quite well) but they're surrounded by long, evocative instrumental sections that highlight Reznor's gifts for arrangement. Whenever Reznor crafts delicate, alternately haunting and pretty soundscapes or interesting sonic juxtapositions, The Fragile is compelling. Since they provide a change of pace, the bursts of industrial noise assist the flow of the album, which never feels indulgent, even though it runs over 100 minutes.
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Rolling Stone
The Fragile isn’t the music of a man going quietly. Trent comes on like an avenging disco godfather returned for the big payback. The Fragile is his version of Pink Floyd‘s The Wall, a double album that vents his alienation and misery into paranoid studio hallucinations, each track crammed with overdubs until there’s no breathing room. The stun-volume guitar riffs, intricate synth squeals and interlocking drum-machine patterns flow together as a two-hour bubble bath in the sewer of Trent’s soul. Even beautiful moments like the piano ballad “La Mer” are full of tension; acoustic bass and an African mbira decorate the piano until a live drum kit shows up to splatter itself all over the studio walls. Rating:
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Rate Your Music
The album is sequenced to where the tracks all flow into one another. Also, speaking of the lyrics thing, Reznor seemed to have learned for once that it's better sometimes when he doesn't say anything, which nearly 1/4 of the tracks have no words.
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Last Fm
The album continues the plot of The Downward Spiral, despite the complete change in sound and style of the album. Instead of heavily distorted instruments, and gritty industrial sounds, the album relies much more on soundscapes, electronic beats, ambient noise, and heavy metal-laden guitar, such as in the single "Starfuckers, Inc." Trent Reznor describes the album's plot and story as "a theme of things falling apart." Reznor has also said the album is bleaker than The Downward Spiral, despite the more aggressive, depressing tone of that album. Many songs on the album borrow bass, guitar, and keyboard lines from other songs on the album; most notably "The Frail" piano becoming "The Fragile" guitar and the bassline used in "La Mer" reappearing in "Into the Void".
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Song Facts
This is one of 23 tracks on The Fragile, which tell a story known only to Reznor. An earlier track is called "The Frail," which uses elements similar to the title track. While "The Fragile" finds Reznor singing to a girl and offering to look after her ("I won't let you fall apart"), it's part of a bigger picture which Trent later explained was his way of working out his issues with addiction.
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Encyclotronic
The Fragile (also known as Halo 14), released on September 21, 1999, is the fourth studio album by Nine Inch Nails. The album features a rich array of electronic beats, ambient noise, and heavy guitar. While it received critical acclaim from many, it did not receive the commercial success that its predecessor, The Downward Spiral, did (attributed variously to the difference in musical climate, and insufficient promotion by Interscope Records).
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COS
The “instrumental-outtakes” compilations play “like a regular album but sound very different without my voice in the way. And there’s different arrangements to certain songs and oddly that makes for a different, complementary music experience.
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Song Meanings
I don't think many people can truly identify with the feelings and events that inspired this album and this song. The beauty of Nine Inch Nails, and what the most loyal fans have discovered time and time again, is that you can apply life to Reznor's music and make your own meaning without deflating the beauty of the music.
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Austin Chronicle
The Fragile's fat, crisp production and dangerously weighty low-end threatened to warp my Bose cabinets and sterilize my neighbors. Disc one, with the radio-ready yelp of "We're in This Together" and "The Day the World Went Away" is the keeper of the two, though even the punchy thrum of a thrusting nailbiter like "The Great Below" sounds oddly dated here. Disc two, however, sounds like leftovers from the Spiral sessions, packed as it is with what can only be described as Reznorian filler, the suddenly quiet, suddenly loud compositions that go and go but never seem to get anywhere.
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Tunebat
The following tracks will sound good when mixed with Nine Inch Nails - The Fragile, because they have similar tempos, adjacent Camelot values, and complementary styles.
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Student Newspaper
The album’s screams of agony and loneliness are far more than brooding for its own sake. The biography of a musician irrefutably affects the way that a piece of music (or more broadly, art) is viewed. Reznor has talked frankly about his volatile battles with depression, anxiety and substance abuse in the build-up to the album, during its formation and during the subsequent tour.
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Diffuser
The Fragile clocks-in at an hour and 43 minutes, but the fact that the album was conceived as a masterwork reveals itself not only in its scale but also in the lavish attention to detail that went into its construction. While Reznor certainly emphasized texture and reached for a sense of epic grandeur on The Downward Spiral, he upped the ante on The Fragile, which captures him focusing less on traditional hooks and "songs" per se and more on sonic layering.
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Washington Post
"The Fragile" (Nothing/Interscope) is a double CD, clocking in at more than 100 minutes. Reznor, who is NIN, clearly sounds as if he's trying to move out of the dark shadows of his own soul. The new album has plenty of industrial rock bombast, but overall there's more subtlety than assault, more guitars and odd strings (cello, ukulele processed on computers) than synthesizers.
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Av Club
The Fragile is a little less dense than The Downward Spiral, exploring a greater range of texture and dynamics while maintaining Reznor's trademark gloom. The album is marked here and there by ringers like Bowie pianist Mike Garson and guitar whiz Adrian Belew, as well as two unexpected guest boardmen, Steve Albini and Dr. Dre. But the set is clearly Reznor's vision.
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Daily Egptian
On this double-disc, Reznor splits 23 songs and more than 100 minutes of scathing rock with a classic NIN soft touch from the piano.
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MTV
Fragile to make it debut at #1 on the Billboard 200 albums.
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Clrvynt
Like “We’re in This Together,” this song is almost eye-rollingly earnest, but it works because of how off-kilter the parts are beyond its huge chorus. Originally opening with a buzzing bassline and kick drum, the understated drum part is complemented by sounds of plucked strings that sound out of tune, which work as added percussive elements and are like a sonic manifestation of the breaking down of the song (and its subject) that the lyrics are trying so desperately to prevent.
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Barnes and Noble
FRAGILE is a sprawling, overwrought maelstrom of vitriolic sonics and tightly wound nausea.
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Rough Trade
The Fragile is even bleaker than 1994's The Downward Spiral as it lurches along with a perpetual scowl. A frenzied collection of buzz-saw pop, Trent Reznor's grim opus yo-yos through two CDs with scattershot intensity. Hushed one minute and explosive the next, spite and anger intermix with heartbreaking resignation, sometimes in the course of one song. Still, Reznor's dour and uncompromising approach is accessible and undeniably entertaining, even when he eschews vocals altogether.
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Best Music
The Fragile is the third studio album by American industrial rock group Nine Inch Nails. Released as a double album on September 21st, 1999, by Nothing Records and Interscope Records in the United States and by Island Records in Europe. This album was produced by Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor and long time collaborator Alan Moulder.
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Music Brainz
The Fragile is the third studio album by American industrial rock band Nine Inch Nails, released as a double album on September 21, 1999, by Nothing and Interscope Records. It was produced by Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor and longtime collaborator Alan Moulder. It was recorded throughout 1997 to 1999 in New Orleans.
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Newbury Comics
The definitive 3LP version of THE FRAGILE, meticulously prepared by Trent Reznor. Remastered from the original sources in 2016 on 180-gram vinyl, with lots of details attended to that you may never notice but we care about.
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Hpb
As The Fragile unfurls, all of Nine Inch Nails' trademarks -- gargantuan processed guitars, ominous electro rhythms, near-ambient keyboards, Trent Reznor's shredded vocals and tortured words -- are unveiled, all sounding how they did on The Downward Spiral. Upon closer inspection, there are new frills. The Fragile lives up to its title once the first disc is over.
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Dead End Follies
People love The Fragile because the intricate and tormented soundscapes of Trent Reznor seem to personally speak to them. It's a sad,angry and thoughtful record people allow themselves feeling sad, angry and thoughtful to. The songs on The Fragile are hypercomposed. They're meant to be taken as objects in and of themselves rather than flow into one another. But somehow Reznor's sadness and anger doesn't seem composed at all. It seems very real.
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Journal Media
On many levels, the new Nine Inch Nails album The Fragile is a gritty meditation about different types of End: the eternal relationship cycle of 'fragility, tension, ordeal, fragmentation' (adapted, with apologies to Wilhelm Reich); fin-de-siècle anxiety; post-millennium foreboding; a spectre of the alien discontinuity that heralds an on-rushing future vastly different from the one envisaged by Enlightenment Project architects.
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Turntable
The Fragile saw another stylistic shift for NIN, moving from the heavy industrial grit and distortion of The Downward Spiral with the introduction of ambient soundscapes, electronic beats and harmonic melodies.
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The Tech
The music on the album spans almost 104 minutes, and in some ways, resembles a greatest hits album, incorporating the varying styles of Reznor’s earlier work with new ideas and instrumentations.
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Treble
The Fragile features music composed in Reznor-specific places made dark by particular feelings and situations: his broken friendship with protege Marilyn Manson, the death of his grandmother, serious addictions and, yes, thoughts of taking his own life.
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Sputnik
Potentially the magnum opus of a group who started strong and only got stronger.
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Ghost Cult
The Fragile (Nothing/Interscope) is Trent Reznor doing all the things, really well.
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Baltimore Sun
"The Fragile" (Nothing/Interscope Halo 14, arriving in stores today), is one of the most anxiously anticipated albums of the fall.
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Q1077
On Sept. 21, 1999, five-plus years after the release of The Downward Spiral, The Fragile arrived. Though not the commercial success of its predecessor, the album did debut at No. 1 and was certified double platinum. It also yielded four singles. The first was "The Day the World Went Away," a haunting slow build of a track utilizing piano, but that was conspicuously free of drums. The track would grow on listeners, as it became the band's first Top 40 hit, peaking at No. 17.
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Britannica
The double album The Fragile appeared in 1999—hitting the top of the charts in its first week of release.
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Altpress
Considered by many on both sides of the fan/business fence as “disappointing” (infuriating “edgy” girls fond of screaming the chorus to “Closer” and the bro-dudes who couldn’t beat people up during the quiet parts), 20 years later, the album still reveals a lot of sonic treats psyche-baring (“We’re In This Together”), familiar (“Just Like You Imagined” feels like a lost track from Peter Gabriel’s third album) and melancholy (“The Great Below,” “Ripe (With Decay)”). No shade to Mr. Ezrin, but this reviewer couldn’t figure out where to subtract from The Fragile’s glorious totality.
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Five Rise Records
When Trent Reznor debuted The Fragile, the followup to his star-making The Downward Spiral some five years after that record’s release, comparisons to Pink Floyd’s go-to double album The Wall abounded. For one thing, Reznor tapped that record’s producer, Bob Ezrin, to help sequence from the chaotic collection of tracks he’d assembled.
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Birth Movies Death
The Fragile, created in conjunction with Reznor's frequent collaborator Atticus Ross. It will feature 37 bonus tracks and over an hour's worth of previously-unheard material.
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Kurt Pankau
The Fragile is sprawling and ambitious. Twenty-three tracks (eight of which are instrumental) spread over two discs. In addition to the usual Reznor arrangements with distorted drums, fuzzed out guitars, and slightly out-of-tune pianos, The Fragile has orchestral elements, horn sections, and three different choirs. To look at it from the outside, it seems like a piece of hubris rather than art.
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Alternative Nation
Crafting an unnerving atmosphere through their swirling electronics and stabs of blinding white light, their set was impossible to turn away from.
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Info Please
The song structures here are dense, riding on massive riffs, but Reznor's gift is his ability to break through those walls with killer hooks.
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Banquet Records
THE FRAGILE by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross clocking in at 150 minutes! Contains instrumentals, alternate versions and over an hour of never before heard material from the original FRAGILE recording sessions. A completely new experience for fans of the original masterpiece.
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Hatchet
The Fragile (Nothing Records), a double-disc set with more than 20 songs. Was it worth the wait? Yes. Although it’s not the masterpiece people expected, it’s still a great album.
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