Nine Inch Nails: Brixton Academy laps up the (still) ear-shredding counsel of Trent

To Hell with the twin attacks of a rail and tube strike – on Tuesday night, the “sold out” sign adorning the marquee of the Brixton Academy spoke only the truth. Come 9pm, front of house, the crush to see Nine Inch Nails’ first London concert for four years veered between the awkward and the severe. Never mind Shanks’s pony, or the 88 bus, the sense tonight was that this was an audience that would have crawled for miles over broken glass to hear the sturm und drang of one of the most enduring acts of the Alternative Nation in full flight.

Needless to say, it was pulverising stuff. Anchored by permanent members Trent Reznor, on vocals, and keyboardist Atticus Ross – the pair responsible for the Oscar-winning score for The Social Network – and a complement of more than capable touring musicians, the frenzy of strobe-lighting that accompanied opening track Mr Self Destruct might have come close to inducing embolisms in ticket holders feeling the strain of a universally difficult day. As the set ticked over into Wish – “you know me, I hate everyone” barked Reznor, as if he was 14 rather than 57 – the groove of relentless grievance was set.

But, for all the impressive bombast, the measure of the evening depended on just how seriously one takes this stuff. Certainly, amid the foetid walls of the Academy, any suggestion that Reznor’s lucrative nihilism might just ring hollow would have sounded heretical. “I wanna f--- you like an animal,” he sang on Closer, a sentiment not entirely divorced from the hair-metal rubbish Nine Inch Nails were once said to have replaced. “God is dead and no one cares, if there’s a hell I’ll see you there,” rang the chorus to Heresy. After an hour of these kind of histrionics, I half expected him to unveil a song called These A-Levels Are Really Hard, I Wish I’d Never Been Born.

Then again, who can say? Perhaps Trent Reznor is the new Man in Black. In a set list that changed with admirable fluidity over the course of his group’s five-date UK tour, each night, without fail, Nine Inch Nails closed their show with Hurt, a song later made famous by Johnny Cash. By now, it doesn’t really matter that the original recording is the version lesser known. Only a fool would try to diminish the legitimacy of source material as good as this.

In the set’s second hour, the musicians even found space for a pair of songs by David Bowie. In a venue so sweaty that the fading fear of coronavirus might well have been surpassed by the threat of dengue fever, the inclusion of I’m Afraid of Americans and Fashion provided moments of suppleness – dare I say levity? – in an evening in which the aural oppression hung as heavy as the humidity in the air. The sight and sound of superstar drummer Ilan Rubin calming his flailing arms in favour of an economical and patient beat was for me one of the highlights of the evening.

Really, though, the night was about music made by a once angry young man who only occasionally sounded like a tiresome old grouch. “Head like a hole, black as your soul,” Reznor sang, “I’d rather die than give you control.” A reasonable response would be to ask him to turn it in – but to turn it up, too.

UK tour over