“Down In It” by Nine Inch Nails

"Down in It" is where Nine Inch Nails began: the project's first single, released on September 15, 1989, by TVT, taken from the debut album Pretty Hate Machine, and the very first song Trent Reznor ever wrote. Reznor wrote it, sang it and recorded it himself, then produced it with Adrian Sherwood and Keith LeBlanc, with Sherwood handling the mix.

It's filed under industrial hip-hop, and that's close: Reznor half-raps, half-sneers his way through a clanking, mechanical groove, all cold drum programming and grinding electronic noise, sounding sulky and a little dangerous. It's rougher and stranger than what came next, but the self-loathing snarl and the machine-shop crunch that would define the band are already in place, and "Head Like a Hole" followed it out the door.

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