Nine Inch Nails - O2 Arena, London, 18/06/2025
By F. Tuck
Nine Inch Nails have long been revered as one of the greatest live acts around, but their first tour in three years is something else. Although all the tricks are familiar, from the intimate second stage to the heavy use of strobes and smoke, the experience feels entirely new. At times it seems less like a concert and more like an immersive art exhibition, and it’s clear Reznor & Co. have been working very hard behind the scenes to make this one stand out.
Split into four acts, the show sees the band flip between the main stage and a tiny island in the middle of the audience, and although it’s an enormous cliché to say they make an arena feel like a club, for the two acts on the B-stage there really are no other words. The first of the two forays into the heart of the crowd, launching the show, exposes Reznor like never before. With only a piano for company initially, he cuts a fragile and exposed figure, the hushed silence around the cavernous hall only amplifying a haunting rendition of Right Where It Belongs. It’s utterly captivating, and an early reminder of why this man is held in such high regard. When he returns to this sanctum later though, joined by opening act Boys Noize, the smoky piano-bar vibe is jettisoned in favour of a throbbing leather-and-spikes goth club. With speakers placed all around the arena, beats and bleeps attack from all angles, creating an immersive display that somehow makes Came Back Haunted even more menacing.
Both these acts however are in stark contract to what happens on the main stage, where songs aren’t so much performed as detonated. Trapped between a huge bank of strobe lights at the back and a thin see-through shroud at the front, onto which giant black-and-white footage of the ongoing performance is projected, the caged silhouettes within seethe and crackle. Tracks from The Downward Spiral in particular sound absolutely colossal tonight, while the frantic thunder of Wish is arguably one of the heaviest things this sterile arena has ever witnessed. Following a Robin Finck-led performance of Reptile, Reznor jokes that the world’s most complicated light show was almost derailed by a broken mic cable, and it’s hard to question that kind of claim when confronted by such visuals. The broken cable isn’t the only technical issue to affect proceedings tonight, but they take nothing from the performance, and if this is the production on a bad night …
Every now and then a tour emerges that breaks new ground and challenges what is possible in the live arena, and the Peel It Back Tour is exactly that, then some. If you’re in a band on the cusp of a venue step up right now, ask yourself one question and one question only: what would NIN do? Phenomenal.
