It was Mötley Crüe drummer and hard rock’s bozo-in-chief Tommy Lee, of all people, who nailed the enduring NSFW brilliance of Nine Inch Nails’ 1994 single Closer.
“Come on, dude: ‘I wanna fuck you like an animal’?” he enthused to US magazine Blender, referring to the song’s provocative lyrical hook. “That’s the all-time fuck song. Those are pure fuck beats – Trent Reznor knew what he was doing. You can fuck to it, you can dance to it and you can break shit to it.”
He wasn’t wrong, even if that wasn’t wholly the intention of the man who wrote it. Closer was three minutes of provocative industrial-disco perfection, a PVC-clad anthem with one foot in the strip club and one in the fetish club. It helped accelerate Nine Inch Nails’ transformation from seething goth malcontents into one of the defining bands of the 1990s and beyond, elevating Trent Reznor to the status of cultural figurehead – albeit one who was on the outside looking in.
“I think popular music sucks today,” Trent told Spin magazine in 1994. “For the most part, I cannot stand the shit that’s at the top of the charts. Now, I’m not saying my sole mission is to turn people on to other music. But maybe I can change things a bit.”
Ironically, NIN themselves fitted into the category of ‘popular music’ by that point. The success of their debut album Pretty Hate Machine – released in October 1989, but turbocharged by the band’s appearance on the inaugural Lollapalooza tour in the summer of 1991 – had done more than any other record to introduce mainstream audiences to industrial music.
Pretty Hate Machine and its follow-up, 1992’s nihilistic Broken EP, turned Trent into the high priest of self-loathing, providing the soundtrack for people who hated themselves but still wanted to dance. However, it’d be their second full-length album, 1994’s The Downward Spiral, that kicked NIN to the next level and turned its creator into bona fide star, albeit a reluctant one. And Closer was a big reason for its success.
Nine Inch Nails hadn’t so much formed as coalesced around a series of demos Trent had written and recorded while working as a studio hand in his adopted hometown of Cleveland, Ohio in the late 80s. Over the next few years, it mutated from one-man project into a more recognisable band and their success began to grow.
As a kid, Trent was a huge fan of Pink Floyd, and specifically their sprawling 1979 album The Wall – an increasingly unhinged concept album about a tortured rock star whose life spirals out of control as his fame grows. Following Pretty Hate Machine, he found himself in his own real-life version of The Wall. The Downward Spiral would be his attempt to dissect what was happening to him and turn it into art.
“It was about me, but a projection of me, a character who systematically destroys all these different things in his life in the search for some sort of answer,” Trent told Metal Hammer of the album in 2005. “And in the crossfire is… sex, relationships, trust, the spectre of religion and its flaws and its lies and its hollowness, and drugs, and a sense of purpose, and self-loathing and desperation.”
He elected to record the song in Los Angeles. Rather than a regular studio, he rented a house in the Hollywood Hills that he’d spotted in an advert and set his equipment up there. The house, located at 10050 Cielo Drive in Benedict Canyon, had been the scene of the 1969 murder of actress Sharon Tate, four of her friends and her unborn son by the followers of cult leader Charles Manson.
While the Tate house would become part of The Downward Spiral’s mythology, Trent insisted that he’d had no idea of the place’s grim history when he signed the rental agreement, and knocked back claims that he idolised “fucked-up old hippie” Manson. That didn’t stop him nicknaming the studio Le Pig, a reference to the fact that the killers had smeared the words ‘Pig’ on the walls in their victims’ blood.
The bestial theme bled into The Downward Spiral, not least on Closer, although Trent had the song’s carnal ‘I want to fuck you like an animal’ lyric in place when he began writing and demoing the song before arriving in Los Angeles.
“The song started with that line,” Trent told Spin. “Everything else kind of got pieced around it.”
One musical inspiration for the track was Iggy Pop’s 1977 song Nightclubbing, a throbbing disco-punk song Iggy co-wrote with Trent’s big hero David Bowie. He sampled Nightclubbing’s relentless, production-line drumbeat for Closer. Another sample came from Roxy Music’s smooth 1982 single Take A Chance With Me, although the NIN man reversed it and sped it up until it was unrecognisable. But compared to the anger and self-disgust that fuelled much of the rest of The Downward Spiral, Closer was almost upbeat.
“[I thought], ‘How am I going to be able to do this? I’m supposed to be tough. I gotta act tough,’” Trent told Spin. “But I’m having fun doing it, so I’m gonna do it. It’s scarier to do that than to do [Mr.] Self Destruct-type songs,” he added, referencing the album’s intense opening track.
The resulting song was certainly the poppiest moment on The Downward Spiral, although ‘pop’ is a relative term. Lines such as ‘You let me violate you / You let me desecrate you’ and ‘My whole existence is flawed / You get me closer to God’ blurred the lines between sex and religion, obsession and control. The ‘I want to fuck you like an animal’ hook only added to the fetish club vibe.
“It’s super-negative and super-hateful,” Trent told Details magazine of the song’s lyrics. “It’s ‘I am a piece of shit and I am declaring that and if you think you want me, here I am.’”
Closer was released as the second single from The Downward Spiral in May 1994, two months after the album came out. To direct the video, Trent enlisted Mark Romanek, the man behind high-profile promos by the likes of Madonna, Lenny Kravitz and David Bowie. Previous NIN videos had ranged from the glitchy, lo-fi visuals for Pretty Hate Machine singles Down In It and Head Like A Hole to the graphic, S&M-themed clip for 1992 single Happiness In Slavery, which saw performance artist Bob Flanagan undergoing unsimulated sexual torture (not surprisingly, it was banned by MTV and everyone else).
The Closer video wasn’t quite as full-on as that, but it still pushed the boundaries of what a mainstream artist could get away with. Filmed inside an abandoned hospital in Los Angeles, it featured a grainy stream of surreal images including nude models, crucified monkeys and angel wings made of animal carcasses. But despite its strangeness and perversity, it was slicker and glossier than past NIN videos – something Trent himself found weird.
“In the Closer video, I was myself but in a foreign environment,” he pointed out on 2005’s The Work Of Director Mark Romanek DVD. “It’s strange when you’re playing in front of 30 people, lip-syncing. Especially when you’re hanging upside down with a piece of meat behind you.”
MTV was never going to play Closer in its original form, but an edited version went into rotation. Similarly, the song was picked up by radio stations despite the constant stream of sexual f-bombs dropped throughout, which were replaced with silence rather than bleeped out. Its status as a key NIN track was cemented by its presence in their memorable set at Woodstock ’94, which saw the mud-caked band play to an estimated 350,000 people. Nine Inch Nails had become proper rock stars.
“Closer gets added at MTV, and somehow people at Woodstock think we did good, and somehow the timing of Rolling Stone finally offering us a cover, like it was all perfect-planned, which it’s not,” he told RIP magazine. “I know when I go to sleep at night, I’ve made the record I wanna make, without any compromise. If that is a sellout, then I’m 100% sellout.”
It didn’t take long for Closer to find its place in the wider culture. It appeared in the opening credits of David Fincher’s bleak 1995 thriller Se7en. By 2000, Fred Durst was referencing it in Limp Bizkit’s song Hot Dog, twisting the lyric around: ‘You wanna fuck me like an animal / You like to burn me on the inside.’ And Trent Reznor himself? He has expressed mixed feelings about the song that did more than any other to raise his band’s profile.
“What I hoped would have been a higher art thing became a frat house, date-rape, strip-club anthem thing,” he told Keyboard magazine in 1995. “Sad. I mean, it is an ugly song, no doubt. It’s not nice. It’s not life-affirmative. It’s probably the ugliest on the record, which is why I dressed it up in nice, easy-to-listen-to music.”
Nine Inch Nails' Tron: Ares Soundtrack is out now via Interscope. Nine Inch Nails Peel It Back US tour starts in New Orleans on February 5 2026. For the full list of dates, visit their official website.
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