With Teeth by Nine Inch Nails Album Info
With Teeth (also known as Halo 19 or WITH_TEETH]) is the fifth full-length studio album by Nine Inch Nails, released on May 3, 2005. It spawned three singles (The Hand That Feeds, Only and Every Day Is Exactly The Same), four tour legs, and much celebration for Trent Reznor's sobriety. According to a statement on nin.com, Reznor stated that producer Rick Rubin was Reznor's "mentor" and "source of inspiration" throughout the planning and writing process of the album. Reznor was also heavily inspired by the use of more analog electronic effects and instruments, specifically tape delay and modular synthesizers, stating that "computers, among other things, are ruining music these days. I hate the Pro Tooled sound of perfection and everything being 'fixed.' This record is most definitely 'un-fixed." During the recording of the album, Reznor listened to Gang Of Four, Public Image Ltd. and Pere Ubu. In an interview with Remix Magazine, Reznor spoke about his new approach to recording: "I wasn’t doing anything consciously to react to what I thought sucked around me. And I didn’t do this record to be the opposite of The Fragile, although it kind of came out that way. It just seemed fresh to me. It seemed inspiring. And the records I found myself listening to while doing this record—like old Gang of Four records, Stooges, Iggy Pop—felt fresh, felt dangerous, felt underproduced. It felt like the spirit of a human being conveying an emotional message was there in those things. And it wasn’t caught up in the glitz and glamour of production bells and whistles, which I myself have embraced at times in the past. So I wanted to kind of strip it down, and I realized I felt comfortable not fitting a lot of layers of stuff in. I thought, 'Let’s only put in what is absolutely necessary. Let’s take a stripped-down approach.' I realized that the last couple of records were written in the studio. So the writing and production and arrangement phase all kind of took place at the same time, bypassing having demos. Songs would start sometimes with a soundscape, sometimes a visual idea, sometimes a drumbeat, sometimes a cool effect, sometimes a chord change. But, usually, the setting was created first, and then a song kind of got wedged in there later on. And this time around, I went about it pretty much the opposite way. I set up a kind of demo room out in Los Angeles and moved out here from New Orleans, really just for a change of pace. I wanted to set up a place where I didn’t have too many options, and I wanted to do demos this time around." With Teeth, unlike most Nine Inch Nails albums, does not have a unified concept and deals with a variety of themes. Reznor wrote the album after overcoming undisclosed addictions and settling legal issues with his former manager, John A. Malm, Jr.: "A lot of this was my relationship with myself, the world at large, and where I might fit into that...Also my relationship to a disease that's going to kill me if I don't deal with it, and I came very close to that. Hopefully disguised enough that it's not a terribly boring record about recovery and addiction and that nonsense." Reznor seemingly gained a new awareness of world issues, and showed this by speaking out against the US Government, as well as becoming a spokesperson for PETA. Some songs seem to deal with addiction ("With Teeth", "Sunspots"), while others have a more political intent ("The Hand That Feeds", "Right Where It Belongs"). The initial concept of the album was an exploration of “loss and possible discovery of self, along with alternate layers of reality and perception set inside a nightmare you can't seem to wake up from; with lots of feedback”. Around this time mysterious quotes and binary codes appeared on the NIN website, including a passage from the book The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin, containing the phrase "bleed-through". The working title for With Teeth was Bleedthrough, referencing the phenomenon of audio bleed-through. In a question posted in the Access section of nin.com, Reznor announced that the working title Bleedthrough had been dropped. Reznor stated that the name was changed because "it was supposed to be about different layers of reality seeping into the next, but I think some people were thinking about blood or a tampon commercial". "'Bleedthrough' is no more," Reznor wrote in a message posted on nin.com, "as the songs and concepts matured, the focus and theme of the album shifted somewhat--leaving me feeling that title was inappropriate. Or you could just say I changed my mind. Yes, the new album has a title and track list, and no I'm not telling you what it is yet". Reznor commented on the change of direction for the album, stating that "About five or six songs into writing it, the songs started to sound good on their own and they didn't need this framework to work together,” and that With Teeth consists of "a collection of songs that are friends with each other, but don't have to rely on each other to make sense", however, the album's narrative arc describes "a difficult journey that begins with a nightmare and ends with acceptance of a new reality.” In an interview in February 2004, Reznor stated that the new material was “more song-oriented (than The Fragile). It's much more lean. It's going to be twelve good punches in the face -- no fillers, no instrumentals, just straight to the point…It's a complicated concept record, but reduced to just simple songs. It's not epic in its scope. It's minimal and a bit brutal." The album's final title may be a reference to a song of the same name by The Melvins, as Reznor is a fan. In a 2024 post on his Instagram profile, Rob Sheridan elaborated on the evolution of the material: "Whenever this work comes around again, people always ask me about the "Bleedthrough" album, how different it was from "With Teeth," etc and I think there’s this fan mythos that some entirely different album was scrapped and sits in a vault somewhere, but that’s not the case. Bleedthrough was just in-progress With Teeth demos, and what changed wasn’t the entire album, it was the new material that was added as recording moved from New Orleans to LA, how that affected the way older demos were completed, how the tracklist evolved, how perspectives shifted. Sometimes concepts change as inspiration changes, and the names and visuals you’ve been sitting with for almost a year don’t feel right anymore. If anything, what you saw at that time was a rare window into the creative process of how an album evolves, not the scrapping of a bunch of material to start from scratch. And the artwork, as well, evolved pretty organically from this into the "With Teeth" artwork." A vinyl reissue campaign of the NIN catalog was begun in 2017 with three albums, and was continued in 2019 when With Teeth was released as the next installment. The item's description reads: "At long last, the Definitive version of With Teeth, meticulously prepared by Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross and NIN art director John Crawford. Remastered in 2019 on 180-gram vinyl, with lots of details attended to that you may never notice but we care about." This edition of the vinyl comes with a digital download card and a booklet containing photos and an essay about the album, written by David Fricke. It also contains the lyrics, adapted from the old PDF poster.
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