The Slip
| Nine Inch Nails
The Slip
The Slip is the seventh studio album by American industrial rock band Nine Inch Nails, released on May 5, 2008 digitally on the Nine Inch Nail website, and on CD on July 22 by The Null Corporation. It was their second release in 2008, following their sixth album Ghosts I-IV, released two months prior. The album was produced by frontman Trent Reznor with collaborators Atticus Ross and Alan Moulder.-Wikipedia
Critic Reviews
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Pitchfork
Trent Reznor returns with yet another digital record; The Slip is a free download that, unlike the sprawling loss-leader Ghosts I-IV, consists of fully realized songs. Pretty good ones, too.
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Rolling Stone
The Slip is, in other words, vintage Nine Inch Nails. After the recent thematic and instrumental excursions, Reznor is back to railing at high volume against his usual targets: life, fate and that perennial bugaboo, his own rot-caked soul.
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COS
The Slip, although not their best, is definitely another triumph for Reznor. It’s full of the usual wicked, banging guitar riffs, synths, and upbeat drumming. “Discipline” and “Echoplex”, which were both released prior to the album, are subsequently two of the more uplifting songs on the album, as well as two of my favorites. One must have track is “Lights in the Sky”, which is a dark and depressing, stripped down track, consisting only of Reznor’s vocals, a piano and little else. It is haunting and demands immediate, multiple listens. Anyone’s obsession with instrumental NIN will also be satisfied here with three out of the ten tracks being just that.
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Free Music Archive
The Slip is the seventh album by American industrial rock act Nine Inch Nails. The album was released free of cost on May 5, 2008 via digital download on the official Nine Inch Nails website. The album was produced by Trent Reznor alongside Atticus Ross and Alan Moulder. The album features vocals and traditional song structures, unlike its 2008 instrumental predecessor Ghosts I–IV. Like that album, though, The Slip was made available without any prior notice or advertisement. The album peaked at position 13 on the Billboard 200 for 2008.
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CC
The Slip (aka Halo 27) has been proclaimed as a further challenge to the music industry, defining an alternative path for musicians interested in the self-promotion of works.
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Av Club
Unsurprisingly, The Slip lacks polish. Reznor's vocal flub at the beginning of "Discipline" remains, but the songs don't sound underproduced, either. The hard-hitting early tracks "1,000,000," "Letting You," and "Discipline" are particularly good, though typical; Reznor keeps farming the same fertile ground that yielded The Slip's predecessors. Also typical is "Lights In The Sky," which follows the brooding, minimalist tradition Reznor established with "Hurt" in 1994. An ominous fog hangs over it and "Corona Radiata," a seven-and-a-half-minute song that splits its time between ambient coda to "Lights," and a gradual introduction to the similarly instrumental "The Four Of Us Are Dying."
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Genius
The Slip (also known as Halo 27) is the eighth studio album from Nine Inch Nails. It was released as a free download on May 5, 2008, a CD/DVD package on July 22, 2008 and a vinyl on August 4th, 2008. While Trent Reznor is known for laboring over his music for years at a time, The Slip was written and recorded in just three weeks.
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Last Fm
The album was released under a Creative Commons license, allowing fans to remix and reuse all or part of the album non-commercially. A tour for the album, entitled "Lights in the Sky 2008", began in late July and took place over most of North America and South America.
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Spin
The Slip is the fifth NIN full-length he’s issued since his 2005 comeback, With Teeth. Funny that the blog era’s ideal rock stars got started back when going online meant standing in a queue.
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Wired
The album is more song-oriented than the instrumental abstraction of the band's recently released Ghosts I-IV, with full vocal tracks and the sort of dark, grimy loops that helped Reznor make his name.
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Pop Matters
The Slip actually sounds like an album. It starts with a blast of five and a half tracks of the mechanimetal that Reznor is most known for, before falling off a cliff for three tracks worth of quiet and ambience, eventually culminating in a fabulous little closer that brings the two sides of the album together.
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Archive
The Slip is the seventh studio album by American industrial rock act Nine Inch Nails, released on May 5, 2008 via digital download. Trent Reznor produced the album alongside Atticus Ross and Alan Moulder.
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Sputnik
"The Slip" is an record that has frequently garnered more attention for its unconventional method of release than it has for Reznor's trademark interweaval of brooding electronic soundscapes and pop sensibilities.
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Trebezine
A better explanation for The Slip and “1,000,000″ is that they’re about how he feels about starting the music revolution. His voice is the one that jumps from rooftop to rooftop through this new and different channel. He is the ultimate underground idol to all of his fans. He is the savior to those who wait on his every move. Yet like a superhero, he keeps his audience at distance.
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Herald Net
“1,000,000” and “Discipline” both deliver with Reznor’s usual blend of industrial rock, techno and pop, a sound that’s made him a staple in the hard rock diet since the early 1990s.
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Off Beat
The Slip is a sonically complex, sometimes overwhelming, cognitively arresting endeavor which finds its auteur more astute than ever. Somehow, after nearly two decades of tortuous deconstruction, it appears that a disenfranchised iconoclast has latched onto an unprecedented source of enmity. And after 45 minutes of well-orchestrated chaos, one can only hope that Reznor’s artist resurgence will fully manifest itself over the course of the next two.
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Jambase
The Slip is a classic straightforward NIN album, featuring Trent Reznor on vocals and various instruments as well as Josh Freese, Robin Finck and Alessandro Cortini. The record was produced by Reznor, Atticus Ross and Alan Moulder. Art direction by Rob Sheridan.
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Slant
The album has two levels: loud (“1,000,000” features all the chainsaw- and motorcycle engine-guitars we’ve come to expect from NIN) and soft (“Lights in the Sky” is a tuneless, minimalist piano dirge). One of the few exceptions is “Corona Radiata,” which slowly builds from spacey arpeggios and planetarium atmospherics to a quiet storm of ambient house beats, distant guitar drones, digitized cat screeches, and babies crying. It’s been a while since I’ve been able to relate to Reznor’s stunted self-deprecation, but I do appreciate both his latter-day politics and his more grown-up existential examinations—you know, the ones that go beyond mere self-hatred.
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NME
The band originally made the album available only as a free download at NIN.com, but will now release it as a limited-edition CD/DVD on July 22 through the band’s own Null Corporation label.
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All Music
Here on The Slip, he retains the sense of urgency that flowed through Year Zero, but as it's a lean album, it's easier to appreciate his mastery of darkness and light or his ability to construct throbbing melodic hooks out of noise. Here, he's no longer a stylized, self-conscious innovator, he's a working musician enraptured by making music, and he's so invigorated by creation it's hard not to get sucked in as well.
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Houston Press
In line with its stealth release, The Slip is far simpler; its lyrics address anger, confusion, frustration and defiance in flashbulb bursts of emotion. The album is also more sonically straightforward, forgoing Zero's urban-decay industrial onslaught for the nuanced synth-pop of With Teeth and The Fragile's funereal instrumentals and heartbeat percussion. Somber, slow piano drowns out Reznor's barely perceptible murmurs on "Lights in the Sky," while the dull roars and eerie space of "Corona Radiata" resemble Brian Eno's ambient works, and white-noise distortion and jackhammering drum-and-bass beats drive "Letting You."
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Metacritic
Quite simply a superb album. The top album of the year.
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List
The Slip ranks up there with NIN’s most accessible work and is packed with crunchy industrial metal with an electro sheen. And hell, it’s totally gratis.
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Loudwire
It was a prolific year for Nine Inch Nails, issuing their second album of 2008 with 'The Slip.' This disc, however, had words, and was a more accessible offering than 'Ghosts I-IV.' The upbeat "Discipline" was the album's lone radio single, but tracks like the driving "1,000,000," the killer guitar line of "Echoplex" and the noisy chaos of "Letting You" made 'The Slip' a listenable treat. The disc would top out at No. 13 on the Billboard 200 .
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NY Times
“The Slip” will not be sold on CD or vinyl until at least July, according to representatives for the band. But the free digital version could stoke interest for Nine Inch Nails’ recently announced concert tour. Already, radio stations have shown interest in “Discipline,” a song from “The Slip” that was released about two weeks ago.
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Stereogum
The Slip is all about percussion, and its titanic drum sound is probably its best feature. The Slip explosively decompresses from excitement to boredom, but still sports its gems.
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Village Voice
The Slip is a powerful, compact album of ten straight-up songs. Or rather, it’s an album of six straight-up songs, two washed-out ambient drone-pieces, one really nice serpentine instrumental, and one track where Reznor mumbles inaudibly over dusty, minimal piano-plinks.
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Whathifi
Nine Inch Nails have made their latest album available to download completely and utterly free from the band's website. What's more, 'The Slip' is available in four different formats – MP3, Apple Lossless, FLAC and WAVE 24/96.
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Flickr
The new album`s awesome. "Discipline" is an awesome song, but the album as an entity simply kicks-ass. Absolutely fantastic.
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Hits Daily Double
The Slip is a traditional NIN album, featuring Trent Reznor on vocals and various instruments as well as Josh Freese, Robin Finck and Alessandro Cortini. The record was produced by Reznor, Atticus Ross and Alan Moulder, with art direction by Rob Sheridan.
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IGN
Put simply, The Slip is an amazing record. Even calling it a record is somewhat strange because as of right now, it is not available on CD. For those who prefer their music on pre-packaged media (CDs and vinyl), The Slip will be in your hands shortly.
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Musicbrainz
Spin has described him as "the most vital artist in music". In 2004, Rolling Stone placed Nine Inch Nails at No. 94 on its list of the 100 greatest artists of all time. They were nominated for induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2014 (their first year of eligibility), nominated again in 2015, and are scheduled for induction in May 2020.
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Fraudster Almanac
The Slip trumps WT in the fun department pretty handily, though, and features a great ballad and two great instrumentals to boot.
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Blabbermouth
NINE INCH NAILS has made its new ten-song, 44-minute minute album entitled "The Slip" available for free download at www.nin.com (free signup required). The new set includes the songs "Echoplex" and "Discipline" which were both posted online during the last couple of weeks ahead of the new album release.
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Scene Point Blank
The Slip, the second Nine Inch Nails release to be released under a Creative Commons license, is a fairly balanced assembly of past Nine Inch Nails trends, lyrically and musically.
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UDiscover
Considering the five-year hiatus Reznor took from Nine Inch Nails after the release of 2008’s The Slip, December 2015 seemed incredibly early to tease that “Nine Inch Nails will return in 2016”. But when Reznor gets the itch, he tends to scratch it.
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Wesleyan Argus
Sound-wise, Nine Inch Nails is as tight as ever, with seven of “The Slip’s” ten tracks presented as pummeling industrial-rock. Thankfully, Reznor’s lyrics aren’t as mired in teen angst as they used to be; he’s more preoccupied with some unspecific form of social protest now.
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Drowned In Sound
The Slip it seems there is no intention to charge for the download at all. Perhaps that will change once the physical product is released on CD/Vinyl in July, but right now we really are being offered something for nothing.
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The Guardian
Nine Inch Nails' last album, 2008's The Slip, was released as a free download on the band's official website. It later appeared on CD and vinyl, reaching No 25 in the UK charts. With a lineup that now includes King Crimson's Adrian Belew and Telefon Tel Aviv's Josh Eustis, Nine Inch Nails' summer dates include appearances at Lollapalooza, Rock en Seine, and the Reading and Leeds festival.
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Ok Gazette
The latest full-length Nine Inch Nails album feels more like a trip than a "Slip." Filled to the brim with buzz-saw electronics, distorted drums and Trent Reznor's peculiar lyrical vitriol, the 11-song release fizzes with a distinct digital effervescence last felt on "The Downward Spiral." Collectively, the songs aren't terribly cohesive, and don't puzzle-piece together as neatly as tracks on "Year Zero" or "With Teeth." However, they manage to stand apart. "Letting You" is like being the last car in a train you can clearly see has headed off the rails' a brisk industrial freak-out, a machine (maybe a "Pretty Hate Machine"?) about to go horribly awry.
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Elusivedisc
Nine Inch Nails presents The Slip, their highly acclaimed 2008 release featuring 10 new tracks, performed by Trent Reznor with Josh Freese, Robin Finck and Alessandro Cortini.
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Louder Sound
Yet another collaboration with Ross and Moulder brought forth The Slip, available for free, guiltless download under a Creative Commons licence once more. Which was nice. Recorded and released in the space of just three weeks, NIN’s seventh LP is yet another cathartic scissor-kick to the music industry’s grinding gears, instantaneous in both its creative process and content.
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Popdose
Aesthetically, The Slip sounds like a composite of Nine Inch Nails’ last two proper releases, With Teeth and Year Zero. From Year Zero it borrows some of the grit and bombast, mish-mashed together with the occasional tendency towards hooks that made With Teeth so accessible. The result is an album that those not intimately acquainted with Reznor’s output might enjoy alongside those who know all the ins-and-outs. Initiates will likely be drawn to “Discipline” and “Echoplex,” the bouncier cuts from the album, while veterans may gravitate towards the aggression and complexity of “Head Down” and “Demon Seed.”
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Music Radar
On July 22, in the US and Canada, Nine Inch Nails - that is to say, Trent Reznor - will issue an individually numbered, limited edition version of The Slip on CD. Each of the 200,000 discs arrives with a DVD of the band rehearsing Slip tracks, plus a 24-page booklet.
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Srcvinyl
The Slip (also known as Halo 27) is the eighth major studio release by Industrial Rock act Nine Inch Nails. The album was produced by Trent Reznor alongside Atticus Ross and Alan Moulder. The album features vocals and traditional song structures, unlike its 2008 counterpart Ghosts I-IV. Much like Ghosts I-IV, the album was released under a Creative Commons license, allowing fans to remix and reuse all or part of the album non-commercially. a tour for the album, entitled "Lights in the Sky 2008", begins in late July and will take place over most of North and South America.
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Synthtopia
The album is a mix of environmental/ambient tracks & rockers, with a piano ballad thrown in for good measure.
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Gimme Radio
Nine Inch Nails present THE SLIP, their highly acclaimed new album, featuring 10 new tracks performed by Trent Reznor with Josh Freese, Robin Finck and Alessandro Cortini. This digipak is limited to 200,000 pieces only, each individually numbered and includes a DVD OF NIN performing live tracks from THE SLIP rehearsals, a 24-page booklet and an exclusive sticker pack. Tracks: "1,000,000," "Head Down," "Demon Seed" and "Lights in the Sky.
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Player Listen
Nine Inch Nails as a live band is generally understood to be a separate entity from its recording studio-based component. Occasionally, past band members are invited to participate in the process when not directly involved with recording new material, Nine Inch Nails' lineup tends to change drastically between major tours. Aside from Trent Reznor remaining on lead vocals, nothing about the live band has remained constant since its inception. Reznor cited the long gestation period between studio albums as part of the reason for these frequent personnel changes.
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Nasty Littleman
The Slip marks the first time Nine Inch Nails–or any artist of NIN’s stature–has made its new album available completely and exclusively for free as a DRM-free digital download. The Slip is available as a high-quality MP3 or in a variety of lossless formats including, for the first time, a higher-than-CD quality 24 bit 96k version. All downloads include a PDF with credits and artwork. Like the free single “Discipline” released last week to terrestrial radio stations and their websites and the track “Echoplex” appearing on iLike, The Slip is a classic straightforward NIN album, featuring Trent Reznor on vocals and various instruments as well as Josh Freese, Robin Finck and Alessandro Cortini. The record was produced by Reznor, Atticus Ross and Alan Moulder. Art direction by Rob Sheridan.
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The Ledger
For a famously self-loathing shut-in, Trent Reznor is sure acting like a magnanimous man about town of late. “This one’s on me,” he says, on Nin.com, where “The Slip” is available for download for absolutely nothing, and you couldn’t leave a tip even if you wanted to. “The Slip,” which is the latest in a recent outpouring of material that’s included the opus album “Ghosts, I-IV,” is the best NIN album since 1994′s “The Downward Spiral.” That’s because it returns to the tightly-coiled tension that marked Reznor’s early work.
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Audioxide
The Slip is loud, fierce, and brimming with captivating hooks. It’s Reznor’s most under-rated work so far.
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Sound Lab
The Slip is his most radical stunt yet. He has issued the album under a Creative Commons license, which allows listeners to remix the songs as they see fit, provided they do so for noncommercial purposes and credit the results to Nine Inch Nails. It’s an impressively democratic, fourth-wall-shattering gesture coming from one of music’s biggest control-freak auteurs. In the future, all of us will be Trent Reznor for 15 minutes.
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Examining The Apparatus
Yesterday, I downloaded NIN's latest album The Slip from NIN.com. I figured since Trent Reznor was literally giving this album away, how could I resist. It's a good album. The best tracks are "Discipline," "Head Down," and "Lights in the Sky." I will post this review/analysis in two parts--the first part detailing the first four tracks. These premature interpretations are subject to change as I listen to the album. I've already changed my interpretation of "Discipline" based on progressive revelation (yeah, I know that this is a theological term) in the latter half of the album. In The Slip I've noticed an aging, depressed, suicidal poet reflecting on the inevitability of his hopeless circumstance and the comfort he's found in the vehicles of time and isolation (paradoxical isolation, for he is reaching out/communicating to millions of people each time he releases an album from his "echoplex")
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Chicagoist
Jesus Kee-rist, Trent Reznor is on a roll. Mere weeks after the release of the instrumental Nine Inch Nails quadruple album Ghosts I-IV, he's released the newest "pop" album by the band, The Slip. While Ghosts offered a tiered pricing plan, The Slip is available absolutely and completely free. Formats include MP3, FLAC, lossless M4A, and even WAV files. DRM-free. Creative Commons copyright. Super-fast download. And the songs ain't bad at all either!
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Jumbly Music
This is one of those rare albums that is free, not a promo, and you would hear a song from it on the radio. There was a feel to this album that seems like since Trent Reznor had no monetary incentive behind it and the release, he took liberties and just explored it in whatever way he wanted to. Some big NIN fans were a little harsh on this, especially closer to the end, but I personally enjoy something that shows a growth and a personal touch, especially with what this album represented. It even comes with a collection of artworks, all minimal, ominous, and gritty, representing each track on the album.
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