We hope this wasn’t goodbye.
Nine Inch Nails fans were put on edge recently when frontman Trent Reznor announced during a concert in Tulsa, Oklahoma, that the band’s current “Peel It Back Tour” might be their last.
“I don’t know if we’re gonna be touring anymore after this,” he told the crowd. “But I’m proud of the show that we’re doing right now.”
Could Nine Inch Nails’ stop at the MGM Grand Garden Arena on Saturday have been their final Vegas show?
Reznor didn’t say anything of the sort during the concert. He didn’t say much to the crowd at all, preferring to let the music do the talking — and it didn’t use its indoor voice.
If this was a farewell, it was a loud, impassioned one.
A few takeaways from the band’s command performance:
A soft start that hit hard
The show began the same way the band did, with one man at a keyboard, his voice a whisper that’d swell into a roar.
Nine Nails Inch started as a studio project, essentially, with Reznor writing all the songs and playing most of the instruments on NIN’s 1989 debut, “Pretty Hate Machine,” before later assembling a live band to tour.
On Saturday, he briefly excavated those roots, launching Nine Inch Nails’ set all by himself on a smaller B-stage in the middle of the arena, where he delivered a spare, spectral “(You Made It Feel Like) Home” from the “Bones and All” soundtrack.
Gradually, he was joined by his bandmates, first bassist Stu Brooks and keyboardist Atticus Ross to add some torque and sinew to a partially acoustic “Ruiner,” then guitarist Robin Finck came aboard as saturnine waltz “Piggy” got weaponized with concussive beats, Reznor kicking his knees into the air as he sang.
“Nothing can stop me now,” he howled.
‘Mr. Self Destruct’ returns
Three decades ago, Reznor sang of being a 26-year-old on his way to hell, and he sounded as if he was taking the express route with a brick on the gas pedal, self-immolating with an anger as fiery hot as the flames of his stated destination.
Now, at 60, the Nine Inch Nails frontman continues to give bullhorn-loud voice to the sentiment in the song “Wish,” which opened the band’s main stage performance in a riot of light, sound and self-doubt turned on its head.
This is what Reznor does best: He uses the precision of electronically enhanced music to soundtrack the dissection of the least precise, messiest thing imaginable: the human condition.
On Saturday, with no new album to promote, Nine Inch Nails pounded into their back catalog instead, diving deepest into 1994’s “Downward Spiral,” a hallmark of industrial rock nihilism whose mission it was to find those few pinpricks of light in the darkest of days, embodied by a storming, downright assaultive “March of the Pigs,” the murky, serpentine trudge of “Reptile,” the raw-lunged shriek of “Heresy” and the palpable ache of “Hurt,” NIN’s standard show-closer.
Visually, Nine Inch Nails bring their songs to life in consistently imaginative ways: For this tour, the main stage was shrouded in a translucent fabric that enabled 3D projection to create an almost hallucinatory effect in which band and imagery became one at times.
When NIN performed on the B-stage, black-and-white live footage was simultaneously projected onto the main stage, creating moments that felt both intimate and outsized at once, much like the songs themselves.
New faces
So, who won the great alt-rock drummer swap of 2025?
You’ll have to wait until the Foo Fighters hit Allegiant Stadium in September for the final verdict on that one. That’s when drummer Ilan Rubin will play with the group for the first time in Vegas, having left NIN last fall after more than a decade in the band.
In a fateful twist, Rubin replaced Josh Freese in the Foos, who then returned to NIN after playing with them from 2005 to 2008 — right before Rubin joined.
Got all that?
Freese isn’t the only new member of NIN’s live band making his debut on this tour: Brooks is another recent addition.
Both hammered the Nails songbook on Saturday, with Freese, in particular, showcased at numerous points in the concert, opening “March of the Pigs” with a smash-mouth percussive fusillade, ending “A Perfect Drug” with a feverish drum solo, playing so hard on “Head Like a Hole” that he was practically hurling his body into his drum kit, attacking the thing with the force of a linebacker working a tackling dummy.
Someone get that man a Gatorade.
Bringing the Noize
After the “Peel It Back Tour” culminates next week, Reznor and Co. will hit Coachella and perform as Nine Inch Noize with German techno DJ-producer Boys Noize (Alexander Ridha), who opened the show.
Fans got a preview of what to expect, sans all the miserable Coachella traffic jams, when NIN once again decamped to the B-stage halfway through the show, where they teamed up with Ridha for a four-song set that sizzled and seethed, pummeled and pulsated, beginning with “Year Zero” deep cut “Vessel,” which had only been played three times in the past 17 years before this tour.
With Ridha essentially remixing songs on the fly with pneumatic beats and clamorous electronics, libidinous NIN staple “Closer” became even more claustrophobic and intense, and the group’s cover of “Parasite” from How to Destroy Angels — Reznor’s side project with his wife, Mariqueen Maandig — was rendered a hard electro battering ram that the band didn’t perform so much as detonate.
“Oh, my God, can it go any faster?” Reznor wondered on “Vessel,” posing a rhetorical question that the band answered in the affirmative on this night.
Contact Jason Bracelin at [email protected] or 702-383-0476. Follow @jasonbracelin76 on Instagram.