This is the best summary I could come up with:

Year Zero isn’t Nine Inch Nails’ strongest album, veering towards the kind of overproduced studio product that Grammys voters like – although there is still a distinct imprimatur to this mainstream blues-rock, as if finished with a black NIN wax seal.

It’s stacked full of superb melody writing from Reznor (Find My Way, All Time Low and Disappointed could easily have made this list), particularly on the R&B bump of Various Methods of Escape, as he drifts sexily into falsetto.

Reznor said he intended it to sound like “someone struggling to put the pieces together” and the sequencing is cleverly topsy-turvy: The Day the World Went Away is a valedictory proto-Arcade Fire epic singalong, baffling you at side one, track two.

And no one cares!” That phrase will have rung through many a slammed teenage bedroom door, but Reznor’s delivery makes it far from juvenile, helped by the raunchy riff – quite possibly a nod to that other classic of pop-industrial heresy, Depeche Mode’s Personal Jesus.

It has a fiendish Detroit bassline, while Reznor, singing one of his most infectious melodies, has the sinister smoothness of a federal agent playing good cop – but the way he repeats phrases with inhuman accuracy gives him away as a replicant.

Reznor cuts a Job-like figure, ranting at a God who has turned away from him and a world going asunder – although you could easily read the lyrics as castigating the betrayed promise of postwar peace, prosperity and cohesion.

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