Hard to believe that at one point Trent Reznor was seen as the quintessential perfectionist, squirreled away in a decaying Victorian house, sweating over each individual track he created, spending upwards of six years between albums. He's shattered that image in the new millennium, especially after his 2007 divorce from Interscope, a parting of the ways that left him free to release albums when and how he chose. Reznor immediately embraced that opportunity, releasing the instrumental double-album Ghosts I-IV without announcement in March 2008, then quickly following it two months later with The Slip, a full-fledged vocal album. Such rapid succession served notice that Reznor intended to take full advantage of his freedom, and its availability as a free lossless download prior to its physical release couldn't help but be seen as a veiled stab at Radiohead's variable pricing for In Rainbows, a move Trent called a "marketing gimmick," a charge that can't quite be leveled against Nine Inch Nails as Reznor encouraged fans to post The Slip elsewhere, to give it away to friends, to remix their tracks if they wished. Unlike Ghosts, which seemed designed with remixing and sampling in mind, The Slip doesn't cry out for recontextualization in order to make sense: it's riveting on its own terms.

1		999,999
2		1,000,000
3		Letting You
4		Discipline
5		Echoplex
6		Head Down
7		Lights in the Sky
8		Corona Radiata
9		The Four of Us Are Dying
10		Demon Seed
11		The Slip