Plumbing the Depths : On Nine Inch Nails’ ‘Downward Spiral,’ Trent Reznor mines a dark personal vein. Is it self-exhumation--or group therapy?

Trent Reznor has two piles of scientific photo books, their titles promising microscopic views of molecular chaos and such, stacked on the coffee table in his San Fernando Valley hotel suite.

It’s not that the musician has suddenly acquired an academic interest in biology. Rather, he’s on the lookout for pictures that he can use as promotional art for his new album, “The Downward Spiral.”

“We were looking for different images of spirals found in nature, like for 12-inch-single covers,” explains Reznor, flipping through the arcane books. “I sent my guy out to go to a variety of places, and he came back with this little gem.”

He picks up a medical volume titled “The Atlas of Gynecologic Pathology” and opens it at random to a page with color photos detailing the devastation that disease can cause. “Horrific,” he says. “And it gets worse.”

More flipped pages. A nervous chuckle over the graphic grotesqueries. “Things could be worse, you know?”

In Reznor’s musical universe, they invariably are.

Disease and decay are hardly foreign metaphors for the consumptive anger and despair that make up the unsettling lyrical world of Nine Inch Nails--the nom de plume under which Reznor records.

On the road, with a revolving lineup of musicians, Nine Inch Nails actually becomes the rock ‘n’ roll band its name would promise. But in the studio, Reznor works primarily alone, creating highly computerized music so dark and so personal that it indeed comes to sound like the most secret innards of one man’s skull, scraped out, perhaps, with a blunt instrument.

The descending arc of the new album runs from punkish broadsides against society, rage against religion and conformity, examinations of such escapist satisfactions as animalistic sex, into full-on, shockingly uncensored self-hatred--suicidal tendencies included. Parts of “The Downward Spiral” are so intense they almost make that pathological photo atlas on Reznor’s coffee table look like a walk in the park.

But if it’s scary stuff, not everyone is frightened off. “Spiral” arrives this week as one of the most anticipated albums of the year. As exhilaratingly well-made as it is spiritually exhausting ( see review, Page 66 ), its landing is likely to leave a major depression--no pun intended.

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Ever since Nine Inch Nails blew audiences away as the surprise hit of the 1991 “Lollapalooza” tour--suddenly quadrupling the sales of its 1989 debut, “Pretty Hate Machine,” well past the million mark--the stakes have been raised for whatever follow-up Reznor might design.

A year and a half ago, to alleviate the pressure, he released a defiantly uncommercial mini-album, “Broken,” and didn’t do any touring to publicize it. Much to his amazement, it entered the Billboard charts at No. 7 and one of its tracks won last year’s Grammy for best metal performance with vocal.

Clearly, Reznor’s confessionals have tapped a vein of youthful alienation that yearns for a more extreme expression than Nirvana’s more archly rendered Angst . So while there’s nothing resembling a possible hit single on the album, which Reznor tried to create without thinking about the pressure to produce an alternative blockbuster, the Zeitgeist could be just right to elevate NIN a few twists higher on the upward spiral of stardom anyway.

“I was interested in exploring some more bleak terrain on this record,” says Reznor, 28, in what may qualify as the understatement of the year.

“I wanted to make a record that worked as a theme through the whole thing, one of self-examination and (self)-discovery and (self)-destruction at the same time, but what could end up being a healthy process, of shedding some blankets of blindness that you surround yourself with.

“And I address some ugly things and some desperate moments on the record, looking for consolation in perhaps the wrong things--through religion, through sex, through empowerment, through drugs. It was things that I’ve dealt with and still deal with at times. . . . I think I kick into self-destruction mode once in a while.”

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Trent Reznor isn’t scary.

This, in fact, may be the most shocking thing about him. And, though it may not be the motivating force that drives him, he clearly has within him a love for shock appeal.

This is, after all, the musician who rented the house in the hills where Sharon Tate and four others were murdered by the Manson Family, though he now regrets the notoriety that brought him. And Nine Inch Nails’ macabre, sadomasochistic, apocalyptic videos have had the feel of snuff films (especially the infamous “Happiness in Slavery,” which graphically depicted machines inflicting genital torture and evisceration on a naked man).

In the hotel suite he’s calling home until he leaves for a yearlong tour--NIN’s first in three years--Reznor is hardly recognizable as the dreadlocked bard of bile seen in concerts past. He is recognizable as a normal guy straight outta Pennsylvania, his straight, dark hair now parted down the middle, only his jutting sideburns much suggesting a rocker-at-work, let alone a budding, brooding icon.

He addresses questions having to do with responsibility and censorship issues with a lot more thoughtful conscientiousness and a lot less cheek than you might expect, seeming genuinely dismayed at the thought that his music might have a negative effect on anyone, and elated by the hope that it might provide the hopeless a healthy catharsis. A pleasant, if perhaps introverted nature seems to be his hallmark.

Reznor’s upbringing was pretty basic rural Americana--broken home, no major trauma, mall culture. He didn’t discover anything remotely underground, he says, until he left small-town Mercer, Pa., to go to college and subsequently started making music in Cleveland.

He hesitates to talk about the records he enjoyed as a kid, stressing that his musical vocabulary was limited by his geographic circumstances. But he will say that “The Wall,” Pink Floyd’s mainstream pillar of empathetic alienation, was the favorite album of his youth.

“It’s when I started to realize that I wasn’t like the other children,” he says, tongue only partly in cheek, “that I wasn’t fitting in right and I didn’t relate to very many people.

“I couldn’t wait to get out of school and run home and listen to that record in my bedroom at my grandparents’ house. I related so much to what was being said. I didn’t know any of what (Pink Floyd’s) Roger Waters might have meant at the time. It didn’t matter. To me, it was like a friend.

“And I realized when we were touring that maybe I provided something that someone out there could relate to. Suddenly you show up in a city where people have never seen you before and you don’t know anybody and there’s a hundred people yelling your lyrics back at you--and they mean it, it’s not just humming along to nonsense, but there’s some conviction in what they’re saying--whether they have any idea what you meant when you wrote those or not, it doesn’t matter, but it’s somehow made a connection.

“It was goose bumps up the back every time. I found that a pretty unique way to communicate with people--intimate in the sense of you’re in someone’s head, but distant in the sense that you don’t ever see that person, you never really do make contact with ‘em.”

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Of course, a Nine Inch Nails album makes a much unlikelier “friend” than any Pink Floyd record: The music is a queasy adrenalin rush of electronic/industrial and guitar/metal textures, with just enough quiet respites in the jolting, stop-and-start dynamics to make Reznor’s broken thrill ride of the mind sound even more intense when it angrily starts up again.

His “garage band” drums may sound live, but like nearly all of the instrumentation, they are mostly computer-sampled--as are the human screams, bee swarms and other disturbing sounds laid low in the dense maelstrom of a mix. There’s a ghost in the machine, and it’s not Casper the friendly one.

Reznor is well aware that the extremeness of the album’s negative emotions may bring charges that his depression and anger are just too bad to be true, adding up to some kind of theatrical affectation. Without wanting to retreat too defensively into an “I really mean it” mode, he assures the world that none of the bitter sentiments in the songs are out-of-character exaggerations.

“It’s what was in my head. If I reached the point where I didn’t feel this way anymore, I wouldn’t write a record about it anymore. I might stop Nine Inch Nails. . . . But I don’t know that I could write anything bleaker than this, nor would I want to. I hope I don’t have to. I hope that this did something that I don’t.

“The next big question is, nobody can be that depressed. Well, I’m writing about certain things, and I’m trying to stay within the parameters.

“With this record I had something I wanted to say. If I had written a happy friggin’ song about smokin’ pot and shootin’ cops, I wouldn’t have put it on the record anyway; it wouldn’t fit. If I was directing a movie about a certain topic, I wouldn’t feel the need to put something unrelated to the theme just because it popped into my head.

“I’m commenting on a certain frame of mind that I’m often in. I’m not saying I don’t have fun once in a while or don’t have a guilt-free moment in my life where I’m not obsessed with shooting myself or something.

“But, as I would think a lot of writers are, I’m more motivated by certain extremes than I am by feeling, ‘Oh, I woke up and it’s a nice day today and I feel OK, I’m gonna write a song about that.’

“I don’t find any need to document that. There’s enough of that out there that I don’t think I could eloquently comment on anything that Paul McCartney hasn’t already said.

“It’s nothing against Paul McCartney, it’s just a different world. I doubt he could write a song about wanting to kill yourself as well as I could, but who knows?”

Reznor believes that “Downward Spiral” sets a new standard, one that’s more “mature” in the brute honesty of its industrial-strength tantrums.

“ ‘Broken,’ to me, was a very surface-level record, especially lyrically,” he says, surprisingly harsh on his own recent work. “I didn’t feel embarrassed to let anyone read the lyrics to that record--which is bad.

“With ‘Downward Spiral,’ I feel a tinge of having done something honest enough that it’s better. Not that everything has to be that way, but there’s things on this record that I still don’t feel comfortable sitting around with people when they hear it--and I think that’s ultimately good.”

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Though Reznor enjoyed the “Lollapalooza” tour, “I would’ve enjoyed it even more if I hadn’t been having a nervous breakdown,” he says.

Part of it was a protracted battle with his record company, TVT, that prevented him from doing any new recording.

That impasse was finally settled when his new label, Interscope, reached a financial agreement with the old one. The larger part of his anxiety, though, was dealing with sudden fame.

“So much stuff has happened in the last few years that’s totally foreign to everything else that I’ve ever been through in my life that I had not come to terms with a lot of things just in my own head about who I am and what I really want.

“I lived a fairly average, anonymous small-town life till I got the idea to do Nine Inch Nails. Then I locked myself in a studio for a year, and then got off the tour bus two years after that, and I didn’t know who I’d turned into.”

The erstwhile outsider suddenly found himself becoming the kind of well-heeled “user” he’d always hated. “If you’re honest with yourself, sometimes it’s kind of cool--not to be above everybody else, but just to be on the inside for once, as opposed to not fitting into anything, ever, anywhere. Everywhere you go, people are kissing your ass. After so much of that, it does affect you. I was finding that the fraternity I was never in, I’m now the president! I’ve become everything I didn’t want to become--and it’s not that bad!”

Coming back to the Tate house in L.A. to record this album, he threw himself into a self-imposed isolation, and suddenly panicked, cut off from all the distractions and adoration and faced with his loathing for his own burgeoning post-stardom persona.

“I wanted to start thinking again, because I hadn’t thought for two years. And coming out here and sitting up in that house, alone in L.A., I got my brain started working again, and it felt good to just know that there was something of me left in me, that I wanted to maintain.

“But it opened up something that I was fearing doing, that I don’t like doing. When I started ‘Downward Spiral’ in the house, I was hoping it would be an easy record to write, and I wouldn’t bog down, I could just kind of get done and get back out on the road--to security, safety, adulation, people!

“And I started realizing that that wasn’t gonna be the case, and I just have to realize that that’s not the right reason to do a record. . . . I was avoiding opening up the hole and climbing down in, closing the door on top of me and waiting down there.”

After a healthy bout of writer’s block, Reznor confronted his demons and came up with “The Downward Spiral.” As a song cycle in which layers of protectiveness are progressively shed, its penultimate number--the title song--is a suicide fantasy.

Reznor considered leaving the tune off the album, afraid it might be taken as a glorification instead of another example of false escape, but ultimately decided to leave it, figuring, “I have a certain degree of faith in people.

“I don’t want to kill myself. I’ve thought about it--seriously at times. And I’ve addressed it, but I don’t want to do it, and I feel it’s an ultimate cop-out in the world. And when I wrote that little bit of poetry, that was how I felt about something. I dared to think that. I’m not afraid to open up the closet door in my mind that I’m really kind of ashamed is even there and look at it, and try to come to terms with that feeling.

“In the context of the record, it was one more thing to look at and self-examine. I would hope that people are intelligent enough to understand what’s being said and address it, and maybe vent out some things in a more positive way of understanding that you’re not the only person in the world that’s thought those things.

“I think that goes back to when I was growing up, what I thought about a lot, some of the stuff that I liked was that, ‘Wow, someone else feels that way.’ Maybe it’s the misery-loves-company statement. But it wasn’t always just sad things and upset things. It was nice to know that you weren’t alone in whatever furthest extreme emotion you were thinking. Which, to me, I thought comforted.”