Album · Nine Inch Nails
Pretty Hate Machine by Nine Inch Nails
Pretty Hate Machine is an album by Nine Inch Nails, released in 1989. 9 songs from it have charted on rock radio countdowns, with 214 countdown appearances in total. The biggest is “Head Like a Hole”, on 89 lists and voted number one once.
Pretty Hate Machine, the debut from Nine Inch Nails, came out on TVT on October 20, 1989, and it's basically one furious man and a roomful of machines. Trent Reznor sang and played most of it himself and co-produced with Flood, John Fryer, Keith LeBlanc and Adrian Sherwood, and the sound is synth-pop with its teeth bared: cold, pulsing electronics bolted onto industrial clang and rock aggression.
The subject matter is the stuff of teenage diaries written in blood: angst, betrayal and love gone bad. "Head Like a Hole" is the battering ram, a dance-floor tantrum; "Down in It" slinks and seethes; "Sin" stomps like a factory floor; "Terrible Lie", "Kinda I Want To" and "Something I Can Never Have" twist the knife from different angles, the last of them a naked ache.
It only got to number 75 in the US at first, but the reviews were glowing, and it kept selling until it went triple platinum, one of the first independently released albums ever to get there. Reznor fell out with TVT over how it was promoted and ended up at Interscope, and Broken was next.
Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.
Songs from Pretty Hate Machine on radio countdowns
| # | Song | Strength | Lists | Best | #1s | Years |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Head Like a Hole#168 of all time | 89 | #1 | 1 | 1990–2026 | |
| 2 | Down In It | 53 | #47 | – | 1990–2026 | |
| 3 | Sin | 20 | #67 | – | 1991–2008 | |
| 4 | Terrible Lie | 24 | #169 | – | 1991–2022 | |
| 5 | Kinda I Want To | 10 | #280 | – | 1991–2005 | |
| 6 | That's What I Get | 7 | #594 | – | 1999–2005 | |
| 7 | Ringfinger | 7 | #1057 | – | 1999–2005 | |
| 8 | Something I Can Never Have | 3 | #204 | – | 1991–2003 | |
| 9 | The Only Time | 1 | #1166 | – | 2003 |
Only songs that appear on at least one countdown are listed. Release data from MusicBrainz.