Song · Nine Inch Nails
“Terrible Lie” by Nine Inch Nails
From the album Pretty Hate Machine (1989)
“Terrible Lie” by Nine Inch Nails appears on 24 radio countdowns from 8 stations between 1991 and 2022. It was first released in 1989 on the album Pretty Hate Machine. Its best result is #169 on the Q101 Top 1,011 Songs of All-Time (December 1999). In the combined RockLists rankings it is #848 alternative song of all time.
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"Terrible Lie" was one of the first songs Trent Reznor wrote and recorded for Pretty Hate Machine, the 1989 Nine Inch Nails debut, and he co-produced it with Flood. It's a collage built to sound like a riot: Reznor has said every drum fill was lifted whole from somewhere else, with six other songs running on tape underneath, fading in and out. Near the end a sour, dissonant tone creeps in, and it started life as a woodblock he pushed through a distortion pedal, sampled and dropped a couple of octaves.
Over all that machinery Reznor howls himself raw. Back in 1989 he called it his favorite song on the record and his favorite to play live, and it has stayed one of the band's most played concert numbers.
Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.
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