This one was pretty epic! And also 30 years in the making for me. While admittedly I was not the biggest NIN fan back in the day, I always wanted to see them live to see how they pulled off their big industrial rock/metal sound. Of course 30 years ago, the tech was a much different story. With laptops and so much other accessible tech, his live show is likely different today. But I can only talk about what I saw.

The night (8/29/25) started out with some techno, metal, rock beats from Boys Noize, a music producer who’s done a million collaborations including with NIN. Not much to see as it was just a dude with some mixers and tech, and his back was to our half of the arena. But it was pretty cool. Loud, bad ass vibes to pump the crowd up. It was also cool because there was no end to the set, no stage break down and all that BS. Instead, his set just turned into a Nine Inch Nails show.

As Boys Noize “dropped the beat,” the curtains dropped on one of two stages to reveal Trent Reznor on piano for a lighter version of Right Where it Belongs which turned into Somewhat Damaged as an outro. More piano for Ruiner and then Piggy. During the first 3 songs, the other members of the band, minus drummer Josh Freese (frickin sweet!) made their way onto the stage. Piggy ended with a long drum outro while Trent and the boys made their way to the main stage. Throughout the night they went back to “stage B” once more and ended the show on the main stage.

You can find the full setlist online, but notable songs were Wish, March of Pigs, Closer, As Alive As You Need Me to Be, Mr. Self Destruct, The Perfect Drug, and The Hand That Feeds. Closer was performed from the small stage (which was closer to us). I was never a big fan of that one, and it was overplayed on the radio, but it was pretty awesome.

They also do a David Bowie song I’m Afraid of the Americans. I thought he was going to get a little political here, but nope. Made a comment along the line of “this might have a different meaning now” but that was it. Throughout the night I was pretty impressed with how solid and strong Reznor’s voice is. I was even more impressed when we looked it up online and found he was 60. I figured early to mid-50s at most.

To close the show, they of course went with Hurt. If you’ve made it this far without knowing who Nine Inch Nails is, you’ll know this song because it’s been covered by everyone, most notably Johnny Cash. As my buddy Frank said, “this isn’t their song anymore.”

For me though, their second to last song was the highlight: Head Like a Hole. This is probably one of my favorite songs of the 90s. The energy was just incredible when I heard this back in the day. I think I even had an EP back in the day (since lost, sold, stolen, traded, who knows) that had multiple versions of this song. It was awesome! No videos or pics though. I wanted to fully enjoy this one.

The use of lights, projections, screens and more made for a great visual show. And while I’ve been to TD Garden countless times, it’s mostly for hockey games and I struggled to remember what other concerts I’ve been to here. From what I recall, it was just one: Guns n Roses in maybe 2002 or 2003. Fittingly, Robin Finck was one of the GNR guitar players then, and he was the guitar player for NIN as well. So I thought that was pretty cool…though you may not care. Ah well.