After The Downward Spiral cemented Nine Inch Nails place as a generational band, Trent Reznor felt a tremendous amount of pressure to write new material. His sophomore album had great commercial success and consequently, had a lot of controversy on its mature lyrical content.

The passing of Clara Clark, Reznor’s grandmother, floods The Fragile with sadness. Reznor used copious amounts of drugs and alcohol while composing the Fragile, an album that abandons the industrial roughness of both Pretty Hate Machine and The Downward Spiral, and samples from the fin de siècle stylings of electronica and ambient. Nine Inch Nails via trip hop? Many hated it, I found it cathartic.

The Fragile arrived in my life a few months before I finished university and my mother getting a cancer diagnosis. The stress and pressure of those months took a toll on my mental sanity and I could only find solace from The Fragile. Whether it was the calm-then-exploding feeling of tracks such as The Day the World Went Away and The Only Way Out is Through or the soothing calmness of The Great Beyond or The Frail, the album was a necessary port in the storm.

I know it’s a stupid cliché to say “this album saved my life” but a cliché comes from multiple repeated experiences. I’m happy this album helped me power through many bad times, and it’s the soothing, almost Tori Amos-esque hope underlying in The Frail what keeps me going. When the time came to finish my first (self-published) novel, The Frail felt like the perfect song for its denouement. After the dust has settled and the violent acts subsided, the time to rebuild is nigh.

-Sam J. Valdés López