You’re going to get the controversy you deserve…
[Video]
[4.43]
Ady Thapliyal: Two bands known for melodic, pop-friendly takes on post-industrial walk into the studio and come up with this mess, a five-minute-long tuneless drone. It sounds like the filler muzak played before a livestream starts; you can almost see the numbers ticking down — the real show’s gonna start soon, right?
[2]
Claire Biddles: I support Trent Reznor’s quest for an EGOT, but my favourite Nine Inch Nails songs are undeniably The Horny Ones. I was thrilled, then, hearing the first 1:45 of “Isn’t Everyone” — music that could conceivably be on the soundtrack to a c1997 cyberpunk thriller, played over one of those sequences where Keanu Reeves stalks through an underground club entirely patronised by hot vampires. But then the big drop blusters into… nothing much? A sub-Metallica chorus with a sexless version of the lyrics for “Head like a Hole”? I usually love a weird prog structure with a reprise at the end, but here it just reinforces how oddly tame and dampened this is.
[5]
Thomas Inskeep: It’s a little heavy, it’s definitely dark and appropriately machinistic, and it sounds exactly as you’d expect a collaboration between these two bands to sound — which is to say, like a more industrial Deftones. I have no complaints.
[8]
Tim de Reuse: It’s very evocative and well produced and apocalyptic, bleak, spooky, cavernous, growly, etcetera. But, man, I don’t need this. It’s 2021. This kind of self-serious doomsaying doesn’t work anymore, especially when it’s so sonically streamlined and lyrically vague and quote-unquote atmospheric. (Hey, remember when HEALTH was, like, noisy? I’m starting to think it was a mass hallucination.) I listen to Trent Reznor doing his best Trent Reznor thing, and it’s almost adorable that he thinks it’s going to have an emotional effect on me. The depths of dread I plumbed sitting alone for the last fifteen months in my studio apartment stress-eating entire family-size bags of pretzels are leagues deeper than the puddle that is this tune’s attempt at pathos. “We get the world we all deserve?” Speak for yourself. I didn’t do shit.
[2]
Juana Giaimo: I find it really hard to take some parts of “Isn’t Everyone” seriously, like when Trent Reznor does some kind of backing vocals (if you can even call those growls that) during Jake Duznik’s verse. The lyrics are also too vague — “We all surrender to those we serve/ we get the world we all deserve” is something an angry teenager could write. Towards the end, the noise gets lighter and Jake Duzsik’s softer voice is easier to digest, but it’s already too late.
[4]
Katherine St Asaph: We’re probably about one year away from some degree of a Trent Reznor reckoning, so maybe it’s not so bad that the slight baby-talk timbre to his vocals takes me out of this for a while. Just a while, though; the rest is the sort of moody maximalist churn I’m hardwired to love.
[8]
Andrew Karpan: As is always the case with Reznor, we are on the inside of a feeling — a strict and monastically-enforced rage that can express itself only in bursts of beat-scheduled pumps. A prolific commitment to the form is what lifts his act, now in its third decade, above parody and keeps it a few notches away from the ghoulish twisted-mirror universe of legacy punks Iggy Pop, Harry Rollins, etc. But I don’t think we really do get the world we deserve, the metalhead sentiment that Reznor and HEALTH frontman Jake Duzsik grunt toward this record’s end. Surely the man whose keyboard noodling was sampled on one of the biggest pop singles of the current century would have something more nuanced to say about fate.
[2]