Nine Inch Nails hits New Orleans with Peel It Back Tour | Music

For all its collective industrial rock fury and rage, Nine Inch Nails is, at its core, the anguished howl of a damaged, exposed and alone individual.

That was made clear from the outset of the band’s visually and aurally stunning presentation at a full Smoothie King Center on Thursday, the opening night of the second North American leg of the Peel It Back Tour.

Trent Reznor, Nine Inch Nails’ mastermind, opened the show by himself on a small, square stage at the center of the arena floor. Under bare, interrogation-style lights, he accompanied himself on piano for “Something I Can Never Have,” from Nine Inch Nails’ debut album, “Pretty Hate Machine.”

“I’m down to just one thing and I’m starting to scare myself,” he pleaded. “You make this all go away/you make this all go away.”

The effect was to collapse the arena to the size of a club and draw thousands of fans in close. They remained mostly silent as Reznor unspooled his stark confessional.

The other musicians joined him one-by-one for “Non-Entity,” an outtake from the 2005 album “With Teeth.” Reznor first performed “Non-Entity” 20 years ago on an MTV special after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, the city he called home for a pivotal, intense span of years in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Still on the small B-stage, the musicians ratcheted up the energy and unease with “Piggy (Nothing Can Stop Me Now),” as Reznor was lit by a jerky, hand-held spotlight. They hustled to the main stage for a raging “Wish,” now at full arena strength.

A 3D effect

The evening’s immersive environment was established during the opening set by Boys Noize, the stage name of German-born electronic dance music DJ and producer Alexander Ridha. He conjured dark club beats and sonic washes from a satellite stage at the rear of the floor as the entire arena was bathed in red light.

Reznor and his bandmates stepped into this unsettling atmosphere. Both the setlist and the band were tweaked for the Peel It Back Tour’s new leg. At least one song from a dozen-plus albums turned up in the set. “The Downward Spiral,” Reznor’s 1994 magnum opus, supplied the most cuts, at five.

New Orleans was the first date to feature Stu Cooks on bass and other instruments, after he replaced Alessandro Cortini. Josh Freese, Nine Inch Nails’ drummer in the mid-2000s, returned last year after being fired by the Foo Fighters (who then replaced Freese with Nine Inch Nails drummer Ilan Rubin).

Freese worked hard to replicate the torrent of beats in Nine Inch Nails recordings. His full-body pounding, combined with Robin Finck’s white-noise guitar and Atticus Ross’ electronic effects, created a scalded effect on “Somewhat Damaged” and elsewhere.

Long sheets of translucent fabric stretched from the lighting rig to the stage. Projecting live, black-and-white footage of the band, frenetically shot by a single cameraman moving among the musicians, onto that fabric produced a three-dimensional effect. It was as if the band was performing inside a holograph.

A crowd of cloned Reznors appeared on the diaphanous strips during “Copy of A.” In “Heresy,” he attempted to elicit an arena rock clap-along to a chorus of “God is dead and no one cares/if there is a hell, I’ll see you there.” A mini-mosh pit briefly broke out in the stranding-room-only front section of the floor during “Gave Up.”

Reznor returned to the B-stage, where he was joined by Boys Noize for a four-song set highlighted by a remixed “Closer,” the insidious, industrial earworm ode to animalistic sex. As with Atticus Ross, with whom he has crafted Academy Award-winning soundtracks, Reznor’s collaboration with Boys Noize goes deep. In April, they’ll appear at the Coachella festival in California as “Nine Inch Noize.”

Back on the main stage, the 3D strips disappeared as the presentation transformed to a more traditional arena configuration. The musicians pummeled away, bearing down on intense cuts from the NIN catalog.

‘Good to be back home’

The night before the concert, they reportedly dined at Jacques-Imo’s, the Oak Street eatery that was a favorite of Reznor’s in the years he lived in New Orleans. But he was fully in character onstage. Not wanting to break the spell, he limited his banter in the first hour to a couple quick thank you’s.

Finally, with only four songs left, he introduced the other musicians and, though he now lives in Los Angeles with a wife and gaggle of kids, offered an enthusiastic, “It’s good to be back home!”

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Nine Inch Nails has endured long enough to qualify as classic rock; the band’s debut is three years shy of its 40th anniversary. But lines like, “Bow down before the one you serve/You’re gonna get what you deserve,” from that album’s “Head Like a Hole,” and “I’m Afraid of Americans,” Reznor’s collaboration with David Bowie, are open to a range of fresh interpretations in the current political environment.

The evening’s final “Hurt,” however, remains what it always was: a chilling, bleak meditation on isolation, loss and loneliness.

With “Hurt,” Reznor brought the show back to where it started.