Nine Inch Nails: A Somewhat Short Review of their Performance at Barclays Center, Brooklyn, New York, 9/2/2025
With opener Boyz Noize
Peel It Back Tour 2025
I have been going to see Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails live since about 2002-2003. To larger fans than myself, I know this is a drip in the pan. I wish my CV were as long as some I've seen posted around the web! But thinking about my age as of this writing (37) and 22-23 years of attendance, I can say I’ve seen NIN evolve a lot over those years, and there’s so much worth talking about.
With Teeth Tour Years
The timing of my becoming a fan and attending live NIN shows was extremely fortuitous. There was a period of time following the release of With Teeth (2005), where Trent and Co. were a relentless force of non-stop touring. The scarcity of tickets twenty years ago was definitely not the issue it is today. What’s funny is that NIN has always played gigantic venues, the same as what they play now, but thinking back on it, tickets were always extremely available. Every few months, I had a pair of tickets for Nine Inch Nails in a drawer somewhere, and if I didn’t, there was an urge not being fulfilled.
In 2005, I graduated from high school, and within my first few years at college, Trent’s words were lost on me completely, as I sank into my own bullshit and depression, all with his band as the soundtrack. There is an undeniable angst to the type of music Nine Inch Nails creates (No Shit). At times, it can take you down a dark path (as any meaningful artist or musician you admire should).
After With Teeth, I became a much larger fan of Nine Inch Nails’ older catalog. Some of you will disagree with me here, but I truly believe works like The Broken EP (1992), The Downward Spiral (1994), and The Fragile (1999) will be works that we appreciate for their composition even more in another twenty-five years.
Moving Ahead
Sorry for any fan-gushing. Now that you are up to par -
I rode solo for this trip to Brooklyn. It happened to be the day after Oasis played MetLife Stadium for the date, which I was lucky enough to go to. Even down in New Jersey, while watching the Gallagher Brothers, Ticketmaster taunted me with promos for their shows over the next two nights. Needless to say, by the time I got there, I was buzzing. Probably not buzzing properly, though. Not understanding the layout I was about to see, I was somewhat feeling shafted by the placement of my seat.
Social Interaction
Forced into social interaction, my discussions with some true-blue fans who were coming off catching the band in Cleveland assured me a kickass time.
The Crooning Reznor
Some don’t like Crooning Trent. By this, I mean songs like Right Where It Belongs from With Teeth, which had become the assumed opener to the performance. If you’re unfamiliar, think of Hurt. For some, it is their default favorite because they feel no other track matches it in the catalog. For others, like myself, I could take or leave Hurt, but otherwise enjoy Crooning Trent.
The Brooding Reznor
The audience could hear the subs coming up intermittently as the bass swelled and the song expanded beyond one person, playing one piano. The band was slowly joining the song as they built the tension-filled soundtrack surrounding their singer.
The Broad Reznor
Staying true to a broad, general setlist common of a Nine Inch Nails show, the opening track was followed by Piggy, but in an original twist, the band played a B-side version from disc 2 of The Downward Spiral, The Nothing Can Stop Me Now remix. It’s a wildly different rendition of the track that makes it the perfect cousin to the original. It also really fit the tone of the show so far and the expectation of what you already knew would be met ahead of you became almost too much to bear.
Insider Knowledge
I had a very tiny bit of insider knowledge from the gents next to me As to how the setup was going to work. Apparently, the craziest of lighting experiences would be seen from further away, due to a huge lighting rig placed caddycorner to ‘Stage B’. We were not in for a bad time with where we were either; they assured me, and I never doubted.
Wish
When the band hit the classic, Wish, it was almost as though you could feel the band tilting the direction of the show. They were going to play some old shit, some new shit, and you were going to like it. They were driving, and you could relax while you screamed your face off, along with every person around you.
My legs have this thing where they like to not work at times, so I use a cane. Obviously, this can create some tension if I don’t hug the thing tightly. Not ever here, though, where seatmates assured me, multiple times, that my crashing into them was cool. I was clearly having some trouble standing, but I knew every word, so they left a middle-aged, part-disabled dude alone to sing some angsty songs with them. It was a nice twist to the evening as a whole.
Copy Of A..
Copy of A (Hesitation Marks, 2013) is a song that I have seen the band perform on numerous occasions. But, and I don’t know why, I don’t know this album all that well. This does not stop Nine Inch Nails from brazenly shoving it into your face.
The Lighting... Oh, My
Notably, within the performance of this song, the band has grown to be very experimental in its lighting. The cinematography of the event became much more the event we all expected than the mere notion of a concert. Large screens sat to the left and right of ‘Stage A’, where a team busting their assess off filmed the band at all angles and projected them in various ways toward the audience. As the sentence went on, the lighting became hard to explain. It looked like it could have been fog, but it was far too crisp. I still don’t know exactly what they were doing, but imagine seeing this ‘smoke’ suddenly roll across the stage, looking like a bundle of tumbleweed. This was when I knew I wasn’t watching something as common as a fog machine. We were witnessing a complicated, coordinated, and calculated attack on our senses, where the creators didn’t care if we knew what was necessarily happening within the mise-en-scène they prepared for us. Nine Inch Nails were there to scramble your brain, leaving you to sort the pieces and figure yourself out later, after the show.
Sensory Overload
There are so many elements firing at once that you lose focus on whatever you had been viewing, with disassociation being the band's attempt from the get-go. Glitchy opener Boyz Noize can attest to this as well, with his separation between clearly constructed parts and ones that he let happen more in the moment. You become a little removed from the performance, a bit, with the intensity of the music and the strobe lights blaring at you constantly. The only thing swinging you back is the sound of familiar songs peppered into the latter part of the set. Specifically, I’m referring to Heresy. Nothing grounds you and brings you back to quintessential Nine Inch Nails than shouting, “God is Dead!” with 15,000 or so others at once.
Fin
With the exception of Less Than (Add Violence, 2017), it was a delectably predictable end to the rest of the set. That isn’t said negatively. The band hit all the right notes, gave you everything you wanted to hear and see, and as fast as they came in, they were gone. And, holy shit, was that really that good? Yes. Yes, it was. 11 out of 10 every time for energy, showmanship, and effort.
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There are so many elements firing at once that you lose focus on whatever you had been viewing, with disassociation being the band's attempt from the get-go. Glitchy opener Boyz Noize can attest to this as well, with his separation between clearly constructed parts and ones that he let happen more in the moment. You become a little removed from the performance, a bit, with the intensity of the music and the strobe lights blaring at you constantly. The only thing swinging you back is the sound of familiar songs peppered into the latter part of the set. Specifically, I’m referring to Heresy. Nothing grounds you and brings you back to quintessential Nine Inch Nails than shouting, “God is Dead!” with 15,000 or so others at once.
Fin
With the exception of Less Than (Add Violence, 2017), it was a delectably predictable end to the rest of the set. That isn’t said negatively. The band hit all the right notes, gave you everything you wanted to hear and see, and as fast as they came in, they were gone. And, holy shit, was that really that good? Yes. Yes, it was. 11 out of 10 every time for energy, showmanship, and effort.
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