THE NIN HOTLINE

Over on Reverb, you've already missed the stage-used Strega and Tascam deck, but as of this posting there are still 11 items available, shipped from Chicago, including that sweet sweet Iceman Bass, and a Dave Smith Instruments Prophet 12 that saw ten years of touring usage. If I had space and wasn't spending all my money building a museum to house a bunch of artifacts I dug out of toilet holes, I'd have jumped on this sale myself.

Back in October, we reported that a promo CD for The Walled Off Hotel appeared on Discogs. Initially just a listing, it wasn't long before the album was offered for sale, listed on Discogs for $2,000. The listing came and went a few times, but earlier this month, it became apparent that a member of the fan community had spent the money, and shared the previously unreleased track "Separation Anxiety" along with a link to a collection of charities specific to Gaza and Palestine, especially appropriate given the Walled Off Hotel's location in Bethlehem.

When the seller got wind of this call to charitable donation, they went ahead and leaked the album, along with questionably sourced instrumental versions of Bad Witch and Not The Actual Events. You can follow the entire saga across a nine-year-old thread on Echoing the Sound, and you can listen to the entire album on YouTube. There are downloadable lossless versions out there, but having been raised in the era of record label lawsuits, that's all I'll say about that here.

There was speculation that the unexpected release of the album was tied to the date on the commemorative ticket stubs being given out on the Peel It Back 2026 tour, but that date just indicated the last day of the tour. The leak of The Walled Off Hotel being the same day is just a strange coincidence.

As mentioned on NINwiki, Trent and Atticus were proud of this album, and still had plans in 2018 to release it on vinyl, but a lot has happened since then. Perhaps now that Interscope is back in the picture, an official release will see the light of day before counterfeit pressings hit the streets.

San Diego brought with it a flurry of unusual activity at the Nine Inch Nails show. In a concert that already has a lot of cameras, there were EVEN MORE cameras, some swooping around on cranes. The cadre of fans that camp out all day to get their spot on the rail, again, spilled onto the floor to find strangers already in the best spots, as part of a production that some folks on Reddit got a behind the scenes peek at - despite “PLEASE - NO PICTURES OR POSTING ON SOCIAL MEDIA” being printed on the top of the plan that got posted there.

Regulars to NIN concerts noted unusual behavior from these people on the rail, and their special treatment, including dedicated security, and some people immediately drew the conclusion that Trent Reznor hates NIN fans and wanted fashionable influencers to be the ones visible in close-up camera shots for what must be an upcoming concert film. Why?

“Can we leave our spots now,” one of these disaffected interlopers sent to a group text that was observed - and photographed - by one member of the fan community, along with the reply “Yes as long as decent looking people take your spots,” and you can imagine how well this went over when it was posted to Discordance, NIN’s official chat community.

Reader, everything you feared has become true. Trent Reznor hates ugly people. Nine Inch Nails is “grasping at straws for the younger audience,” the NIN camp are creeping on minors, NIN is becoming KISS, and “Nine Inch Live: 2027 will almost certainly be sponsored by Kylie Cosmetics, Urban Outfitters and Discord“ and since young influencers have been posting about going to NIN shows on TikTok, this lineup of disinterested actors on the rail must be a last gasp for relevancy (from a band that sold out just about every show on their most recent tour, and continues to sell out arenas into 2026). The New Management has taken control over the NIN subreddit. John Crawford is doing Mariqueen’s crooked bidding and ensuring that only beautiful influencers get the good seats and access to catering. The undead lich of Walt Disney has cursed Atticus Ross, using him to draw Trent Reznor into an eternity of corporate whoredom. Nine Inch Nails as you know it is dead.

Quite the turn of events on a tour where members of the NIN camp have been walking around, giving out limited edition shirts to fans. Where the very Discordance admins that are suppressing angry fans online have also been sharing polaroids of concert attendees excited enough about the show to go beyond jeans and a tshirt. Randomly upgrading people in seats to the floor. Trent Reznor also quietly does a shit ton of really big-hearted charity, and has been giving lanyards and stickies to awkward dorks for as long as I’ve been going to NIN shows.

Nonetheless, some people who were hurt by their experience seem to think that Trent, or Kraw, or PerfectRug, or Management have made an executive decision that NIN fans are ugly and fat, and are erasing all who dissent, and are otherwise refusing to acknowledge their concerns. Some of those people are propagating rumors, casting aspersions, and suggesting some pretty disgusting things, because they had a bad experience with people who are part of this production. I’ve also noticed expressions of ageism aimed against young fans and newcomers to Nine Inch Nails. That might be even slightly titillating if it was anything more interesting than “Oh yeah, name three songs” gatekeeping.

There’s a lot that’s terrible in this world. A lot of us have lived through trauma, more are experiencing trauma every day. Let down by so many seemingly good people who end up being shady, we’re trained to be on our guard for heroes to fall. And when a third party brought in for an interesting project includes some people making some poor choices, there’s clearly the temptation to use that as an excuse to unload grief and anger about the ever-changing world and focus that on an artist you’ve been following for decades. Every tour will have its melodrama, but I think that’s a terrible excuse for maligning the character of people who are working hard to try and enhance the experience for the fans of all ages that continue filling up arenas.

Anaheim was the next stop on the tour, and the same group of people were doing similar work for that show, and if reports on the internet are to be believed, things were communicated better with the folks in line for the show. It was much less contentious, and I didn’t see any text messages about old white dudes.

So - if we’re lucky, we’ll see a Peel It Back concert film of some variety. Maybe something you’re not expecting. Or maybe it ends up next to the Wave Goodbye footage, because plans didn’t work out.

There have been some big changes and some subtle ones too, across fan sites that have survived the massacre that social networks and wikiepdia hath wrought in the early 21st century.

Most recently, NIN Tour History has undergone a massive site redesign, the renovation bringing a slick new look, with the occasional twitchy interactions that remind me of NIN DVD menus of old. Along with the redesign, there've been bug fixes, new badges being added, and my favorite new feature, a performance map; when you create an account at NIN Tour History, you can indicate which shows you've gone to, and now you'll get a visual geographic reference accompanying your itinerary.

Last June saw the relaunch of NINlive as a dynamic, database-driven website. Up until last year, that gargantuan collection of information was a collection of static HTML pages, which made sitewide changes challenging, and fun statistical analysis impossible. Now, each performance includes a breakdown of band members, banter transcriptions, and stats about the venue, the songs performed, and more. You can also create an NINlive account via Discord, start racking up shows there as well.

NIN Wiki just pushed five years of software updates through in a very short amount of time. Most of the benefits of this are security related, as well as better handling of special characters, but it did require a complete rewrite of the site's skin, which Malechite had to port over in meticulous detail. If you're still seeing a coming soon screen when you visit the site, just perform a hard refresh.

Have I given a shout out to https://nin.fan/ yet? If people still had homepages bookmarked like they did in 1998, most of you would set your home page to nin.fan and not the NIN Hotline and I wouldn't even be mad about it.

Over here, I've been doing some behind-the-scenes updates to the ol' Hotline lately, as well as making some subtle changes to the public facing portion of the site. One thing worth calling out is that the URL of the RSS feed has changed, for boring technical reasons. If you're subscribed to a Feedburner URL, update your subscription to point to this classically obtuse URL - ironically, "4fb.xml" was the filename I chose for the feed because it was "For Facebook", which would automatically pipe in updates from the site. A lot of sites moved traffic to Facebook, and most of them are dead now. I hope The NIN Hotline outlasts Facebook, just as it did MySpace, Friendster, and many of the magazines referenced in our article archives. I also updated our 'merch' page, which really are just some curated eBay searches, and if you buy from that page, I get a couple cents. It's been broken for ages, and the site's still up, so don't feel obligated.

Lastly, the starfuckers.inc Instagram account, with 10x the followers of the ninhotline Instagram account (for which I am definitely not a little bit jealous about, nuh uh) is reportedly building a web presence for their Peel It Back tour journal project. You can submit your story about the tour to be featured on the site, and this warms my heart. There were tour journals on TheFragile.com and on ETS that, maybe one day, I'll be able to recover. The way I recovered all of Seems Like Salvation. And that is what's called burying the lede, friends.