Wine and Cheese: Nine Inch Nails and 100 gecs

The two duos both began their careers with a caffeinated concoction of electronic pop, despite drawing from influences of punk, industrial, and metal. The result, both times, is astounding, impressive whiplash.

It’s your dream collab. The artists you add back-to-back to the queue. The pairing you can’t get enough of. You know they sound good together, but why? Welcome to Wine and Cheese, a series investigating the why and telling you all about it.

Written by Felix Kalvesmaki

Photos courtesy of Joseph Cultice and Skullcandy

The experimental electronic duo 100 gecs is known for incorporating an eclectic buffet of genres into its own brand of pop music. Dylan Brady and Laura Les give their fans whiplash with dubstep breakdowns alongside sleek indie guitar lines alongside pop punk melody and harmony. It’s a lot to take in at once, but once the absurdity of it all settles in, the post-ironic fusion can produce serotonin at a rate unprecedented.

They aren’t, however, the first to fuse such separate genres. Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross may be better known these days for their soundtrack work (you’ve heard their music if you’ve watched "The Social Network" or "Bird Box"). More recently, they were also sampled on Lil Nas X’s inescapable “Old Town Road” and produced Halsey’s fourth record. But the band started as a solo project that frontman Reznor worked on in the evening at the music studio he worked custodial for. The resulting debut album Pretty Hate Machine balances bitter, heavy vocal stylings and industrial dissonance with dance-floor-ready synthpop instrumentation.

Pretty Hate Machine, in some ways, feels like a predecessor to the 100 gecs debut released 30 years later, 1000 gecs. Both albums combine alternative vocal performances and production styles with pop aesthetics, sensibilities, and songwriting. And, to be honest, both are occasionally a little campy (and yeah, that’s kind of shade).

Photo courtesy of Ian Dickson

Nine Inch Nails kicked off its career in 1989, with the aforementioned Pretty Hate Machine. The gated snares are a dead giveaway — this album is ‘80s synthpop through-and-through, though it’s admittedly pretty metal-adjacent synthpop. NIN wouldn’t lean more into the industrial metal that became Reznor’s signature until 1994’s The Downward Spiral, but there’s plenty for a heavy music fan to appreciate here. The album’s thematic centerpiece is rage itself; the guitars are still distorted as all hell, and Reznor’s angsty delivery sells even his lyrical slip-ups pretty effectively. Harsh noise that blips in and out of the chorus of “Sanctified” progresses the genre past its conventions, too. It echoes the end of gecs’ “745 sticky,” where glitchy storms rage between vocal samples and barking dogs.

Formed in 2015, 100 gecs is best described as a hyperpop band — and among the first to be described that way. Hyperpop is a loose term to describe the works of everybody from Charli XCX and A.G. Cook’s to electronic maestros SOPHIE and Arca, along with members of Cook’s famed PC Music collective (GFOTY, Hannah Diamond, et. al). 100 gecs’ Laura Les helped curate one of its defining sources, the hyperpop playlist on Spotify, and for good reason. Her and Dylan Brady’s work on 1000 gecs earns it the title of the most amphetaminic album of 2019, and the follow-up remix record 1000 gecs and the Tree of Clues is the only thing that could’ve knocked it off the throne. The album is indescribable, really. (Go listen to it. It’s only 23 minutes.)

What Reznor, Brady, and Les all do successfully with Pretty Hate Machine and 1000 gecs respectively is cross between genres with fluid ease. At the end of gecs’ “800 db cloud,” pop punk harmonies and erratic electronics lash into chugging doom riffs and growled, pig-like vocals provided by Brady. In the midst of Nine Inch Nails’ infectiously club-y “Head Like A Hole,” Reznor’s guitar becomes a wall of sound at the chorus, drowning out everything but the snare and Trent’s own wails. Very suddenly, in both of these songs, pop fans find themselves presented with something closer to heavy metal. And what’s more — they discover that the gap between these two genres isn’t incredibly far.

But both of these artists don’t just flirt with metal — The Downward Spiral was full-on industrial metal, and it saw Reznor (and thus Nine Inch Nails) completely ditch the synthpop proclivities that colored his first effort. And as for gecs, look no further than the remix of “hand crushed by a mallet,” which just feels like the musical equivalent of running from Ghostface. Hardcore vocalist Craig Owens’ screams sampled over and over again while creaking guitars and knee-deep fuzz and distortion whirl around in the back just hits with the intensity of a thousand suns.

Photo courtesy of Nic John

Funnily enough, Reznor and gecs both also make use of spoken word on their debut album’s big singles. Reznor hit the scene with “Down In It,” in which he almost raps his way through his (unfortunately, rather cringe) lyrics. Contrast this to easily the most famous 100 gecs song “money machine,” with an opening soliloquy which has since seen performances in theaters across the country: “Hey you little pissbaby. You think you’re so f-cking cool? Huh? You think you’re so f-cking tough? You talk a lot of big game for someone with such a small truck. Aw, look at those arms! Your arms are so f-cking cute, they look like little cigarettes. I bet I could smoke you, I could roast you, and you’d love it, and then you’d text me ‘I love you’ and then I’d f-cking ghost you.”

Reznor only improved as a lyricist since his debut, and the same will likely go for Les and Brady. But Les’ delivery of these lines really sells it, and on top of all of that, it’s just incredibly goddamn funny. There’s a common conversation around 100 gecs about whether or not they’re “being serious,” and it doesn’t matter. In reality, no, Les didn’t think this would win her the Pulitzer. But even if 30 years down the line we collectively laugh at this like I do Reznor’s “Down In It,” it doesn’t take away from everything else that redeems “money machine,” namely the production.

Innovation in music does not come without experimentation. Mistakes will date a record in a negative way — the impact of the era it was made in overpowers the product itself. Ingenuity will date a record in a good way — this is what kicked off the trend, or perfected the trend, that we still copy to this day. I don’t know where Nine Inch Nails truly falls in that dichotomy, and we’ll simply have to wait to see where 100 gecs ends up. They both deserve credit for not only taking the risk to try, but for successfully crossing between genres as effortlessly as they do.