Nine Inch Nails’ ‘The Fragile’ turns 27 on 21 September
Nothing and Interscope issued Nine Inch Nails’ third album, “The Fragile,” on 21 September 1999. The 23-track double record turns 27 this year.
Nine Inch Nails released their third studio album, “The Fragile,” through Nothing Records and Interscope Records on 21 September 1999. The industrial rock record arrived as a double album of 23 tracks running one hour and 43 minutes, split across two discs titled “Left” and “Right.” It turns 27 this year.
Five years separated “The Fragile” from “The Downward Spiral.” Trent Reznor recorded and mixed the album at Nothing Studios in New Orleans between 1997 and 1999, producing it with Alan Moulder, who also engineered and mixed. Steve Albini handled supplemental drum recording at his Electrical Audio in Chicago, Tom Baker mastered at Precision Mastering, and Bob Ezrin was credited for final continuity and flow. Dr. Dre assisted with the mix on “Even Deeper.” Danny Lohner played guitars on six tracks and contributed drum programming and synthesizers, Adrian Belew added guitar to “Just Like You Imagined,” “The Great Below” and “Where Is Everybody?”, and Mike Garson played piano on “Just Like You Imagined,” “The Way Out Is Through” and “Ripe (With Decay).” Bill Rieflin drummed on “La Mer” alongside vocalist Denise Milfort, Jerome Dillon supplied chorus drums on “We’re in This Together,” and Charlie Clouser, Keith Hillebrandt and Steve Duda covered programming and sound design. David Carson took art direction, design and photography.
Disc one, “Left,” runs “Somewhat Damaged,” “The Day the World Went Away,” “The Frail,” “The Wretched,” “We’re in This Together,” “The Fragile,” “Just Like You Imagined,” “Even Deeper,” “Pilgrimage,” “No, You Don’t,” “La Mer” and “The Great Below.” Disc two, “Right,” runs “The Way Out Is Through,” “Into the Void,” “Where Is Everybody?”, “The Mark Has Been Made,” “Please,” “Starfuckers, Inc.,” “Complication,” “I’m Looking Forward to Joining You, Finally,” “The Big Come Down,” “Underneath It All” and “Ripe (With Decay).” Three singles came from the album: “The Day the World Went Away” on 20 July 1999, “We’re in This Together” on 27 September 1999 and “Into the Void” on 10 January 2000, with “Starfuckers, Inc.” issued as a promotional single.
The album entered the Billboard 200 at number one with first-week sales of 229,000 copies, the band’s first chart-topping album, then fell to number 16 the following week. The RIAA certified it double platinum on 4 January 2000, and it had sold 898,000 copies in the United States by May 2005. The US edition appeared as a two-CD tri-fold digipak; the three-LP vinyl pressing carried two tracks absent from the CD, “10 Miles High” and “The New Flesh,” and came in a gatefold sleeve with a 24-page booklet. In 2017 the album was reissued on vinyl as a Definitive Edition alongside “The Fragile: Deviations 1,” a limited four-LP instrumental set that was not pressed to CD. The album streams on Spotify. Sources differ on the exact day: MusicBrainz lists 20 September 1999, while Wikipedia, Discogs and Spotify all give 21 September 1999.
About Nine Inch Nails
Trent Reznor formed Nine Inch Nails in Cleveland, Ohio in 1988, writing and recording the project’s material during off-hours at Right Track Studio, where he worked as an engineer and janitor. TVT Records issued the debut album, “Pretty Hate Machine,” on 20 October 1989. The “Broken” EP followed in 1992, by which point Reznor had negotiated the Nothing Records imprint through Interscope, and “The Downward Spiral” arrived in 1994. Side-Line covered the 2019 book “Into The Never”, which examined that album’s cultural reach, and reported that Johnny Cash initially resisted recording “Hurt”, the “Downward Spiral” track he covered in 2002. “The Fragile” closed the 1990s for the band, and the remix album “Things Falling Apart” followed in 2000. Reznor returned with “With Teeth” in 2005, “Year Zero” in 2007, and both “Ghosts I-IV” and “The Slip” in 2008. Atticus Ross became a full member ahead of “Hesitation Marks” in 2013, and the pair have scored film and television alongside the band since. Side-Line has since reported on Reznor’s appearance on the deluxe vinyl reissue of the 1990 Pigface debut, the Future Ruins festival announced by Reznor and Ross in 2025, the “TRON Ares: Divergence” companion album, and the “Nine Inch Noize” collaboration with Boys Noize released in April 2026. “The Fragile” turns 27 this year, the record that took the band to number one in the United States for the first time.
Support Side-Line
More people read Side-Line than ever, and there is still no paywall and no advertising. Readers pay for it instead - from $5 a month.
Why we ask
Advertising revenues across the media are falling fast. Unlike many news organisations we have not put up a paywall, and we refuse to add annoying advertising, so we need to ask for your help. Side-Line’s independent journalism takes time, money and hard work to produce, and we do it to push the artists we like, who are equally fighting to survive.
Handled by PayPal.
Chief editor of Side-Line – which basically means I spend my days wading through a relentless flood of press releases from labels, artists, DJs, and zealous correspondents. My job? Strip out the promo nonsense, verify what’s actually real, and decide which stories make the cut and which get tossed into the digital void. Outside the news filter bubble, I’m all in for quality sushi and helping raise funds for Ukraine’s ongoing fight against the modern-day axis of evil. Besides music I’m also an SEO and AI content flow specialist and have an interest in everything finance from stocks to crypto. There is music in everything!
