With Nine Inch Nails’ spellbinding Tension tour as just one of his many projects, Leroy Bennett applies an appreciation for storytelling to his dynamic stage design.
Saving the best for last, we’ve chosen our 51 favorite albums of 2013, pulled from the acclaimed and the unsung — some of the best as well as most boundary-pushing releases from rock and beyond.
Nine Inch Nails: Hesitation Marks
Chelsea Wolfe: Pain Is Beauty
Gorguts: Colored Sands
Neko Case: The Worse Things Get, the Harder I Fight; the Harder I Fight, the More I Love You
Volcano Choir: Repave
Modern Life Is War: Fever Hunting
King Khan & The Shrines: Idle No More
Though it’s not an Earth-shattering collaboration, David Lynch’s new Nine Inch Nails video is very…well, Lynchian…with high-contrast stills, flashing red squares, and frenetic, blurred-vision closeups of Trent Reznor’s beloved face.
After a buzz-building set at Coachella last month, How to Destroy Angels brought its visually stimulating stage show to Chicago and other select cities. Lost in Concert photographer Brendan Shanley was on hand to document the color-saturated performance.
How to Destroy Angels: Welcome Oblivion (Columbia, 3/5/13)
Post-industrial collective How to Destroy Angels has put out two EPs of haunting, glitchy pop, made our 2012 end-of-year lists, and generally proved that despite the hiatus of Nine Inch Nails, Trent Reznor remains a creative force.
In March of this year, we’ll finally get a proper full-length from the band, which also includes Atticus Ross, Mariqueen Maandig, and Rob Sheridan.
How to Destroy Angels: An Omen EP (Columbia, 11/13/12)
Images of cell mitosis, swarming bees, and something that could be either a crosswalk or an orgy of organisms — the video for How to Destroy Angels’ “The Loop Closes” has the intensity of a visual countdown to the apocalypse, viewed through the dispassionate eye of city surveillance.
How to Destroy Angels: An Omen EP (Columbia, 11/13/12)
Four people sit in a cabin on the seashore, with light coming in through one window and hastily nailed boards over the other apertures. A greenish glow, the only hint of electricity, comes from an instrument that has an opaque purpose. Everyone seems to be waiting for something.
“Ice Age,” the new video from How to Destroy Angels’ An Omen EP, directed by John Hillcoat (The Proposition, The Road, Lawless), is a bleak affair. Minimalist at first, both in scope and music,the song soon makes it clear that time is running out.