07/22/2026
Trent Reznor has always had a tendency to tour himself into exhaustion. Out of which comes a time of silence in which he deals or copes with whatever his life throws out of him. At the other end of that silence comes music.
After two years of touring on 1994's The Downward Spiral and where that lead him Trent went on to make a double album called The Fragile in 1999, filled with his typical synth, guitars, and agony. In 2016 he revisited the tapes and put together Deviations 1. Filled with tracks left off The Fragile, enough to have made it a three CD album.
Overall Deviations 1 is an instrumental reworking of The Fragile. More than just having the vocals stripped multiple songs have different intros or outros as they lead into tracks not on the original version. Some songs are just slightly different, or maybe I hear things in it I never heard with vocals.
Trent has said in interviews that songs on this album listed as instrumental have or had vocals at some stage in production. Whether he was unhappy with them or they were unfinished he didn't see them fit to be on this album. I didn't put Deviations 2 on my 2026 bingo card, I would guess we'd likely get it in '29 if ever, but I'll hope either way.
