Not The Actual Events, Add Violence, and Bad Witch form a trilogy of related pieces, respectively released in 2016, 2017, and 2018. This period marks the inclusion of Atticus Ross as an official member of Nine Inch Nails, as well as a member of the live band during the tours. This trilogy is sometimes colloquially referred to as the "Cold And Black And Infinite" trilogy.
Tracklist
Not The Actual Events
- "Branches/Bones" – 1:46
- "Dear World," – 4:06
- "She's Gone Away" – 6:00
- "The Idea Of You" – 3:27
- "Burning Bright (Field On Fire)" – 5:50
Add Violence
- "Less Than" – 3:30
- "The Lovers" – 4:09
- "This Isn't The Place" – 4:44
- "Not Anymore" – 3:06
- "The Background World" – 11:44
Bad Witch
- "Shit Mirror" – 3:06
- "Ahead Of Ourselves" – 3:30
- "Play The Goddamned Part" – 4:51
- "God Break Down The Door" – 4:14
- "I'm Not From This World" – 6:41
- "Over And Out" – 7:49
Concept
In an interview with Lizzy Goodman posted on nin.com, Trent Reznor explains the trilogy’s concept in detail:
But to be clear, the record isn’t about Trump, it’s about making sense of the world. The first record, Not the Actual Events, was more of an internal fantasy of what if I lit a match to my life and just embraced burning the whole fucking thing down. You know? All of this is an illusion and I really should be dead or lying in a ditch somewhere. Who I really am is an addict that self-destructs. That’s my true nature and this is an illusion and some borrowed time. It wasn’t a pleasant thing, but it felt like, that’s a story to tell. And if felt like something I needed to internally process.
And that supported other things that were interesting to us like aggressive music and a sense of the self-referential, looking back at other albums and pilfering bits of the art design to confuse people and also because I was thinking about those records. To try picking up a guitar, which I told myself I would never do again for whatever reason and finding, you know what? It sounds fucking good. Listening back and going, you know what? That was a good song from 25 years ago, it’s not bad to play something like that. There are no rules. That was the first record.
It wasn’t fully mapped out but it was meant to feel like if we broke up one big record – if it was Downward Spiral, which has acts, if we do an album like that, but release one act at a time, it will be more immediate and the level of adrenaline and momentum will be higher. And maybe it will be consumed in a way that feels more digestible to an outside world that doesn’t have long attention spans anymore.
With the second one, Add Violence, the idea was, loosely, to zoom out, to be more global and to imply that maybe we’re all in a simulated reality. And that might introduce the concept of meaninglessness but also provide a safe container to explain why everything feels off.
By the time we got to the third one, we had an idea in mind but it felt … rehearsed. Predictable. In the end, what felt true was to say that we as a society and as a species are probably an accident, a mutation. Really what we are is fucking animals. And the illusion was enlightenment. The more we’ve connected with each other the dumber we’ve gotten and the more we decide we want to kill each other. We’re not some elevated transcendent beings, we’re bacteria in a jar. I wanted the art direction of Bad Witch to feel like shadows on a cave wall and we’re trying to figure out what it is and really there’s no nice, clean, safe scientific explanation. We’re just an accident. String theory and quantum physics is a fucking trick. And we’re not going to suddenly elevate ourselves into transcendent beings. We’re kidding ourselves. I know this will be an unsatisfying conclusion for some people. It isn’t what they want. They want it to be full matrix virtual reality, and this is the opposite of that, this is dirt and a broken computer chip and everything you believe in is really just bullshit.
Summary
Coming soon.
About
Not The Actual Events was first acknowledged by Trent Reznor on December 17, 2016 in a post on nin.com stating that, "it's an unfriendly, fairly impenetrable record that we needed to make. It's an EP because that ended up being the proper length to tell that story." In June 2017, it was announced that Not The Actual Events is the first in a trilogy of related EPs to be released 6-8 months apart.
Add Violence was officially announced on July 13, 2017. Its first track, "Less Than", was released digitally on the same day, with an accompanying music video directed by Brook Linder. "This Isn't The Place" was made available on the official NIN YouTube channel on July 18, 2017.
Bad Witch, now being classified as an album, was officially announced on May 10, 2018. On May 19, at "The Physical World" ticket presale, an exclusive listening station was made available for those in attendance. It gave fans the opportunity to hear the songs "Ahead Of Ourselves" and "Play The Goddamned Part" before the album's release.
Themes
In an interview with Entertainment Weekly[1], Reznor explained some of the thematic ideas behind the releases:
All of these EPs started out with the same question, which is, "Where is my place in the world today?" And I'm asking myself that question as someone who's getting older and looks at a world that feels increasingly unfamiliar. Is that aging? I feel a lot differently about things than I did when I was 20. Thank god. But the way I feel about them isn't as terrifying to me as I thought it would be when I was 20. Your perspective does change. The things that seem to be happening in the world at the moment seem crazier than they ever have today. Is that me saying it because I'm older? Or are things actually f—king up in a very extreme way? Or is it some combination of both?
I think we're in a f—d up situation where the world is off-axis. Originally, [Bad Witch] was going to be an even more extreme version of Add Violence. And what it wound up being was a much more pessimistic [message] where we're not living in a simulation and there's not a convenient external thing we can blame this on — at our core, [humans] are just an accident, and when fully realized we will just exterminate ourselves, and we aren't these enlightened creatures. We're really just animals. And I do feel that way to some degree in real life. Take the promise of technology. Where's that gotten us really? The more connected we are, the worse we are as a society.
Blurbs from nin.com for each piece of the trilogy give a vague allusion to the ideas presented:
- Not The Actual Events: "PART ONE OF A THREE EP TRILOGY OF RECORDS. UNAPOLOGETIC, UNFRIENDLY, DENSE, LYRICALLY COMPLEX, SO-FAR-BEHIND-THE-TIMES-IT’S-AHEAD-OF-ITS-TIME, HIPSTER-REPELLING UNCOMPROMISING MUSIC SMART PEOPLE CAN FUCK TO. IT MAY NOT BE FOR YOU."
- Add Violence: "PART TWO. THE VIEW WIDENS AND EVERYTHING IS IN QUESTION."
- Bad Witch: "CONCLUSION. SHADOWS ON THE CAVE WALL." (This is likely a reference to Plato's allegory of the cave.)
Links to other NIN material
The Downward Spiral
Side B of the Not The Actual Events vinyl features 3 additional, unlisted tracks from The Downward Spiral in reverse: "Hurt", "The Downward Spiral", and "Reptile".
In the physical component for Not The Actual Events, the lyrics of "She's Gone Away" are superimposed over a copy of page 14 from the Deluxe Edition booklet of The Downward Spiral, and lyrics embedded in the Apple Music release include extra, unsung words directly referencing "Reptile".
Additional lyrics for "Less Than" are printed on the physical component of Add Violence, and they seem to reference "March Of The Pigs" by using the line "doesn't it make you feel better".
The Fragile / Still
Additional lyrics for "This Isn't The Place", printed on the physical component of Add Violence, are a direct quote from "The Great Below", with the line "I can still feel you, even so far away". Reznor stated during a concert that "This Isn't The Place" is about David Bowie. It can be speculated that this line relates to mourning in both cases.
An alternate front cover for Not The Actual Events is re-purposed Still cover art, in a possible nod to David Bowie's re-purposed cover art on The Next Day.
With Teeth / Bleedthrough
Lyrics from the track "The Background World" feature a reference to the Bleedthrough concept, in the line "Is always bleeding through".
Additional lyrics for "The Lovers" printed on the physical component of Add Violence feature the word "godlike", possibly referencing "The Life You Didn't Lead". In an episode of the Song Exploder podcast[2], Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross explained that the song is about an alternate reality that explores what might have happened if Reznor had never left his old home of New Orleans and had never gotten clean and sober. It began as a sort of poem he had written in order to explore what he calls the "seduction of addiction" and stated that "it was me allowing myself permission to examine a period of my life that I had consciously chose not to think about very much, then immerse myself in it in a kinda 'What if the path I'm currently on wasn't really the right one, and I just went hard-left the other way?".
Year Zero
Add Violence is in part a continuation of the Year Zero story and its ARG, with elements appearing on the front cover and the back cover of the album ("SIMULATION ON", "PRESENCE", "2022", etc), in the music video for "This Isn't The Place" (appearance of a "Cedocore" box), and on the physical component. They are all linked together with multiple variations of the panel, mentions referencing the concept of The Trilogy, the physical component appearing itself in the music video, etc.
It should also be noted that the physical component for Add Violence has the number "24.0.00" on the front which harkens back to the "24.xx.yy" number patterns used throughout the ARG for Year Zero.
Some of the posters from the NIN 2017-2018 touring cycle had Year Zero imagery (the Art Is Resistance flag and The Presence) incorporated into the artwork.
Physical Components
The first two EPs came with "Physical components", optionally purchased items that were something to physically interact with. For Not The Actual Events, a sealed black envelope of artwork and lyric sheets was available, filled with black makeup powder. For Add Violence, a booklet printed in the style of a manual was made, containing artwork, lyrics, and stickers. Bad Witch did not have a component, but it's speculated by fans that the act of having to physically queue in the US for tickets for the accompanying tour, was the physical component for this release. This event was officially referred to as the Physical World presale, and each buyer was given a special presentation envelope for their ticket.
Lyrics
Coming soon.
Hidden Lyrics
Some songs in the trilogy have additional lyrics hidden in various places. Some are hidden as "stealth" print in the CD/vinyl liner notes, some are printed in the physical components, some are embedded in the digital distribution, and single lines were placed in some MP3 tags.
Touring
For more information, see NIN 2017-2018
The trilogy was supported by a back-to-basics touring cycle that mainly visited North America. The main leg of the tour, called Cold And Black And Infinite and supported by The Jesus and Mary Chain, took place in 2018. The shows saw an incredible variety in the setlists and also some unexpected live song premieres, such as "And All That Could Have Been" and "The Perfect Drug". Another leg of the Cold And Black And Infinite Tour was originally planned for 2020, but these dates were canceled due to the pandemic. Shows were eventually played in 2022 to close out this era.
Live
All songs from the trilogy have been played live except "The Idea Of You", "Not Anymore", "Play The Goddamned Part", and "I'm Not From This World".
Interviews
Coming soon.
Artworks
Not The Actual Events Alternate digital artwork
Not The Actual Events Physical component
Hidden lyrics example 1
Hidden lyrics example 2
Lyric card depicting "Reptile" superimposition
Add Violence Physical component
Add Violence back cover
Screenshot from the "This Isn't The Place" video
Bad Witch back cover
