'Year Zero' Begins Today For NINE INCH NAILS

Launch Radio Networks reports: NINE INCH NAILS releases "Year Zero" today (Tuesday, April 17),the band's fifth album and first conceptual effort. The 16-track album takes place in the year 2022, when the U.S. has been taken over by a religious dictatorship that may be putting drugs in the nation's water supply while the world nears the brink of environmental and social collapse. Civil liberties and privacy rights have been abolished, and citizens are getting frightening glimpses of an entity known only as "the Presence."

Frontman Trent Reznor has said recently that the CD is based on his fears about the present state of the world. Reznor told Launch that music has always been the best way for him to express his emotions. "In my early 20s, when I first started to write music, it was because I found a way to take this anger or pain or resentment or sadness and express it in a way other than punching a wall, that had some beauty to it," he said. "And then later found out, if I put it to music, there's real power here and there's kind of a truthful honesty or something that people that have heard it seem to relate to."

"Year Zero" has been the subject of one of the year's most talked-about marketing campaigns. Several songs from the CD were left on computer hard drives at venues on the band's recent European tour, with fans finding them and posting them on the Web. The campaign also featured cryptic messages on T-shirts and a maze of disturbing, linked web sites that expanded upon the album's apocalyptic storyline.

A source recently told Billboard that the campaign will continue for the next 18 months, with "Year Zero" reportedly the first of two concept albums.

NINE INCH NAILS recently announced another round of European shows for August, with a trip to Australia and Japan planned for May. North American dates have not been announced yet.