Nine Inch Nails: Reset to 'Year Zero'

Grainy and hard to navigate, full of text and images so commonplace they feel real, these interlocking pages (executed by veteran game designers 42 Entertainment) don't tell a story; they lock the participant into an experience that feels both personal and epic. That's exactly what Reznor's music does. Equal parts whisper and arena-sized punch, it immerses listeners into an emotional state that their own responses come to mirror.

The songs on "Year Zero," each from the perspective of a character or characters already existent in the ARG, draw a connection between the music fan's passionate identification with songs and the gamer's experience of becoming someone else online.

Though it's supposedly a leap that Reznor's not writing about his own pain anymore, he still puts his gift for the ultra-personal to good use. The frantic first single, "Survivalism," reveals the inner thoughts of a resistance leader; "Vessel" does the same for a religious fanatic; "The Good Soldier," with its swaggering drum line beat, captures the reluctance of a military man.

Lyrics describing group experiences still circle back to the individual. Even the beautiful, cataclysmic closing suite, with its images of nuclear winter, focuses on a dying lover's tender plea. Melodramatic on their own, Reznor's lyrics gain believability when heard under the encompassing sway of the game.

Reznor has always been tuned into alternate realities, mostly those that occupy and distort the minds of average, uptight social outcasts. He emerged during the 1990s heyday of psychological rock, when fellow angsty boys Kurt Cobain and Eddie Vedder were making generational anthems about sexual confusion, personal drift and the sorrows of the broken home.

A tech nerd with roots in meticulous synth pop instead of punk or metal, Reznor made screamingly intense music about repression and its consequences; his great themes were sadomasochism (literal and metaphorical) and mental disorder.

*

Personal to political

Whatever personal issues propelled Reznor toward this ugly subject matter, his genius in the studio made his obsessions blossom into art. The Nine Inch Nails sound quickly evolved from plain industrial rock to the satanic equivalent of the Beach Boys -- infinitely complex explorations of the way musical structures can mirror the ups and downs of an interior life.