One of my favourite gaming franchises is Metal Gear Solid. The storytelling is rich, with dozens of narratives that spindle and twine across decades and lifetimes. Everything happens in the same universe, but there are two eras in which the story takes place. The present day setting is the meat of the project, while the games set in the 60s and 70s lend colour and context.This simple structuring device gives an already expansive world even more room to roam, turbo-boosting the longevity of the series.
When a musical project enters its fourth decade, the creative element is usually long gone. Sure, you have the stadium-filling, pension-pot-boosting tours, but there's an hourglass of creative energy, which slips away quickly. Take any celebrated, critically acclaimed artist you like, and think to yourself, what was their best record? You’ll find that the answer will lie almost exclusively in the first three releases. Of course, there is absolutely nothing wrong with this. No one person, or group of individuals, can be expected to remain on blistering hot form for their entire lives. So how do you stop the project from fizzling out in middle age? How do you stay fresh?
Ghosts V and Ghosts VI, (helpfully titled Together and Locusts respectively) were released together, for free through Nine Inch Nails’ official site in March. A surprise gift for these difficult times, it’s hard to see whether this was a planned release or thrown out due to the circumstances. The double project has a marathon length at 2.5 hours, and is mainly ambient and experimental. It’s not suitable for anyone wanting a gentle intro to the discography. However, it is good for stretching across the aisle to the soundtrack work that Reznor and Ross have built up, and for expanding the longevity of Nine Inch Nails itself.
Nine Inch Nails is most at home when it’s dark. The bulk of the band’s instrumental sections have been negative, paranoid pieces, like horror movie music. That’s been the case for over 30 years, which makes Locusts the most comfortable side of this project to listen to for seasoned Nine Inch Nails fans. It’s structure is also more thoroughly thought-out. One moment that sticks out on Together is the ending to Still Right Here, the final song. It explodes with a beats-laden crescendo and comes out of nowhere, jarring you awake after an hour of calm ambient dreaming. It feels like an afterthought. Compare this with Run Like Hell on Locusts, which builds naturally into an urgent peak. It’s a bridging moment after the first three songs and leads smoothly into the mid section of shorter tracks.
The best material on Locusts comes at the front. The Cursed Clock is a perfect way to start the album. The slow piano, the string instruments played percussively, the high pitched whine seeping through the mix, this is not like anything Nine Inch Nails have done before but is still familiar. The Worriment Waltz is another key piece. The gentle piano gives it some sweet Still vibes, but the lonely horns and suspended strings that drift in and out give us a slightly different flavour than we’re used to.
I don’t want to ignore Together entirely - The title track’s soft-focus piano work is a gentle sunbeam, peeking through the mist like the 2nd movement of Another Version Of The Truth. The shifting background soundscape is kept under control by the simple melody played over and over. Apart is a truly expansive, epic piece. This is again led by the piano, with synthetic backing for a mutated, post-organic feel. It is Nine Inch Nails stripped down to the core, a 13 minute song that’s like a three minute one stretched out. Hope We Can Again has those happy-Trent hallmarks - A major key bassline, gentle glockenspiel notes, and a smile behind the blackness. Together’s overall mood is one of hope and calmness, but it does wander around a bit too much and doesn’t hammer home it’s point half as well as Locusts does.
These albums are built to showcase the longer pieces, but there are some tracks that would have happily sat alongside the bite-size vignettes of Ghosts I-IV. Your New Normal, If It Happens (Don’t Mind Me), Your Touch, Almost Dawn, these songs link GhostsV/VI back to the original run of albums, justifying their status as the latest editions of this project-within-a-project. It’s exciting to think that Ghosts, each edition a freer sandbox of ideas than a “standard” Nine Inch Nails album, is a series that could be revisited at any time. Presumably future releases will be surprise drops like all that came before. Ghosts I-IV came with a simple warning on the official website - “Two Weeks!” while V/VI was just put out there one day. It’s an impressive thought that the band can have hours of instrumental pieces in the locker, ready to go at the push of a button.
Ghosts has rarely been performed in concert, and aside from a mid-set break to showcase the material during the Lights In The Sky tour, Nine Inch Nails has found it hard to put music from this series into a live setting. Whether this is an issue of personal taste, artistic licence, or mere practicality is not something worth discussing. What this does do though is give a clean break between these albums and the rest of the band’s back catalogue. The longer Nine Inch Nails refrain from playing Ghosts material live, the stronger the statement becomes - This is in a separate canon.
Like with Kojima and his storyline set in the recent past, Reznor and Ross find further depths of exploration in the Ghosts series. It’s not the main thrust of Nine Inch Nails, which allows them to relax the rules and open up the possibilities of where they want to go. It’s a great device, a trick which means they can get away with much more than they should under the Nine Inch Nails moniker. Together and Locusts, along with the rest of the Ghosts series, should be seen and consumed in this light. It would be unfair to make these records stand up to the likes of The Fragile and The Downward Spiral, and if you are going to compare these albums to those golden-era masterpieces, you will disappoint yourself. Take the Ghosts series for what it is - A different timeline, just like Snake Eater and The Phantom Pain. If you approach these albums in the right spirit, they're well worth the long run time.
