“Closer” by Nine Inch Nails

"Closer" crawled out of The Downward Spiral, the second Nine Inch Nails album, as its second single in May 1994, and most copies of that single went out under a different name, "Closer to God", which is also the title of an alternate take on the disc. Trent Reznor wrote the words and the music, arranged it, sang lead and backing vocals and played the bass, guitars, keyboards and synthesizers himself. He produced it with Flood, and Alan Moulder mixed it.

What they built is industrial music with its hips moving, a lurching groove of clank and hiss that sounds like a factory floor trying to dance, with Reznor sliding from a whisper to a snarl. The song is really about self-loathing and obsession, but that filthy chorus got it widely mistaken for an ode to lust, and the misunderstanding only helped: it became the band's most successful single up to then and cemented Reznor's reputation in industrial rock.

Radio and MTV played censored versions of the song and of Mark Romanek's video, and it climbed to 41 on the Hot 100 and 3 in Australia. In the band's own Halo numbering it's Halo 9, their ninth official release.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.