Nine Inch Nails has finished a new album, an all-instrumental effort called Ghosts: I-IV, and the band is giving some of the music away for free over the internet.

You can download the first quarter of the album for free at the NIN homepage, and if you like it, you can buy the whole thing for just five bucks.

According to Trent Reznor, the musician who basically is Nine Inch Nails, this album is a direct result of his having finished his last recording contract. From Billboard.com:

"I've been considering and wanting to make this kind of record for years, but by its very nature it wouldn't have made sense until this point," says Reznor, who collaborated on the music with Alan Moulder, Atticus Ross, Alessandro Cortini, Adrian Belew and Brian Viglione. "This collection of music is the result of working from a very visual perspective -- dressing imagined locations and scenarios with sound and texture; a soundtrack for daydreams. I'm very pleased with the result and the ability to present it directly to you without interference."

Demand for the free/cheap music has been tremendous, causing the NIN webservers to crawl to a halt as fans download the project. Reznor says he's trying to get more servers up to meet the demand ... meanwhile, if you check around, you'll find other places to download the free content.
I'm downloading the free tracks now and look forward to giving them a listen.

In my opinion, Reznor has done some brilliant work in the past. The NIN album The Fragile is easily the creative high-watermark of the industrial rock era. Almost ten years later, The Fragile holds up as a highly entertaining and compelling listening experience. However, more recent NIN efforts have been fair to lackluster, with last year's Year Zero ultimately turning out to be a real disappointment.

I'm glad to have a chance to hear a sizable chunk of NIN's new material before I commit a dime of my own money to it.

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