Typically, nihilism isn’t a trait that lends itself to career longevity. Neither is isolation, detachment, or angst. Thankfully, Nine Inch Nails architect Trent Reznor is coming to terms with these tenets—although, he’s in no way severing his relationship with them. Rather than allowing them to feast on him, he’s using them to feed his artistry and to fuel a whole new generation of fans.

Since shaking off the rust on With Teeth (2005), Reznor has launched an offensive against the corporate arm of the music industry, defiantly leaking copies of the dystopian nightmare, Year Zero, while on tour in 2007 and recently turning to the Internet for the independent release of Ghosts I-IV, an album consisting of 36 instrumental soundscapes. With his latest release, The Slip, he’s redefined the limits of artistic liberation, offering the album for free via download.

In many ways, The Slip embodies the album he’s always dreamed of making—dark, dissonant, angry, and unhinged yet focused, vivid, vulnerable, and driven. Through frantic layers and propulsive squalls, Reznor exhumes his personal demons on “1,000,000” and exposes social ills on “Letting You.” “Echoplex” captures the psychological agony of vintage NIN fidelity while the haunting, minor-chord balladry of “Lights in the Sky” uneasily releases the disc’s pent-up frustrations. Later, the ominous, foreboding, and mysterious instrumentals “Corona Radiata” and “The Four of Us Are Dying” close upon the acrimonious search for self-actualization of “Demon Seed.”

Collectively, The Slip is a sonically complex, sometimes overwhelming, cognitively arresting endeavor which finds its auteur more astute than ever. Somehow, after nearly two decades of tortuous deconstruction, it appears that a disenfranchised iconoclast has latched onto an unprecedented source of enmity. And after 45 minutes of well-orchestrated chaos, one can only hope that Reznor’s artist resurgence will fully manifest itself over the course of the next two.