Industrial music is amazing. Think of it: Back in the ’80s, a bunch of fucking psychos were like, “Maybe we could make something that’s thrash metal but also disco,” and then the whole world changed. I know that’s not really how it went. I know that’s not what Cabaret Voltaire or Throbbing Gristle or Einstürzende Neubauten had in mind. I know that you could come up with all sorts of reasons why Nine Inch Nails, the subject of this particular concert review, aren’t really industrial music at all. But when NIN’s Peel It Back tour came to Baltimore on Tuesday, that’s how it felt — as if the entire histories of KMFDM and Skinny Puppy and Front 242 unfolded to take us to the point where 60-year-old Trent Reznor could punctuate his electro ooze-throb with jagged guitar eruptions and make a whole arena levitate.

I paid money for this show. That’s how you know this shit was serious. Specifically, I paid something in the neighborhood of $250, which is the most that I have ever paid to see a live performance of any kind. I am a spoiled rock critic, and I usually get into these things for free. I could’ve probably gotten into this thing for free if I’d fired off the right emails to the right people, but I didn’t even try. When you get comp tickets to an arena show, you usually don’t get confirmation until 24 hours before the show itself. (This is a recent Live Nation phenomenon, and boo hoo, wah wah, I know.) I couldn’t wait on this one. It was my chance to go see motherfucking Nine Inch Nails at the Baltimore Arena with my two oldest friends. This meant something, and it would’ve been worth the money even if the show had been dogshit. Thankfully, the show was very much not dogshit.

Technically, it’s the CFG Bank Arena now, and that’s after a bunch of corporate name changes in recent years. But that building will always be the Baltimore Arena to me. It’s where I went to the circus, the Harlem Globetrotters, the monster trucks, and the few Bullets games that they used to play in Baltimore after the team moved to DC. Thirty years ago, my oldest friend Nat went to his first concert in that building. It was Nine Inch Nails, touring behind The Downward Spiral, with Marilyn Manson and the Jim Rose Circus Sideshow opening. I wasn’t at that show, and I was so fucking jealous of everyone who was there. The next day at school, it was a sea of Nine Inch Nails shirts in the hallway. I’d seen NIN in the time since that 1995 show, but I hadn’t seen them at the Baltimore Arena.

In 1995, nobody would’ve bet money that Nine Inch Nails would still be an operational band thirty years later. That would’ve been a ridiculous thing to predict. Seeing them in 2025 should be what it must’ve been to see the Rolling Stones in 1995. It should be a pure exercise in cynical nostalgia. This was not that. Or maybe it was that, but done in the most vital and artistic way you could possibly imagine. Also, the Rolling Stones are still playing shows now, so maybe we’ll all be able to go see Nine Inch Nails in 2055. That would be nice.

When you’re hearing songs that you have heard for your entire life, in a building that means something to you, with friends who were around when those songs were first coming out, that touches some intense part of your brain, something that’s far beyond the regular thrill of going to a great live show. On Tuesday night, I kept thinking that I have lived a life to these songs. I have had real formative moments when these songs were playing. And then, right there, that’s the guy who made those songs, and now he’s singing them and twisting them up into new shapes, and he seems to love them just as much as we do. What a feeling.

The current tour is an absolute marvel. Nine Inch Nails are playing with a tiny group, just five musicians onstage. Famously, their drummer quit between the European and American legs of the tour. He went off to join Foo Fighters, so NIN picked up Josh Freese, the guy who Foo Fighters had just fired. Freese only got a day to rehearse with the band before joining up, and after watching him in action, I cannot see how this could possibly be true. He must be an android. They all must be androids. Trent Reznor looks like a damn superhero today. Nine Inch Nails switch their setlist up from night to night, and they must have the best lighting and dry-ice people in the business, since the entire show still feels intricately planned-out from moment to moment.

These days, we don’t get Marilyn Manson and the Jim Rose Circus Sideshow opening anymore. I didn’t miss them. We also don’t get Queens Of The Stone Age and Death From Above 1979, the two bands I saw open for NIN at Madison Square Garden in 2005. I didn’t really miss them, either. Instead, the Paint It Black tour opener is Boys Noize, the German-Iraqi dance DJ who remixed Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ incredible Challengers score for home listening. Boys Noize and his DJ tables were at the back of the room, above the soundbooth, and he went on forever. He dropped lots of pulsating, evil tracks while the entire room was bathed in red light. As my friend Evan pointed it, it made us feel like we were in the blood rave from Blade. (Evan and I saw Blade together when it came out, and it’s maybe the must fun I ever had at a movie.) Boys Noize sounded cool as hell and mixed in little bits and pieces of Nine Inch Nails songs, but we weren’t there to watch him. He was there to set a mood, and that’s exactly what he did. Then the lights went out, and holy shit, there was Trent Reznor, right next to us.

I avoided spoilers as much as I could. “Spoilers” is a ridiculous word to apply to a concert, especially to one where the setlist varies from city to city, but I wanted to be fully in the moment and not thinking about what I might hear five songs later. So I didn’t know that the NIN show started out on the mini-stage in the middle of the room, with Trent Reznor alone on piano, singing like he’s Elton John. That’s how it started — still and ghostly solo-piano versions of “Right Where It Belongs” and “Ruiner.” On record, “Ruiner” all bings and whirrs and ahhs — this incredible and overwhelming wave of production. But “Ruiner” is also beautiful, and it goes like crazy in this radically reimagined context. If Reznor had decided to play the whole show by himself on piano like that, nobody would’ve been mad. Instead, his bandmates arrived onstage one by one, Stop Making Sense-style, and then they were over on the big stage, banging out “Wish.”

If I’d made “Wish,” nobody could tell me shit. I would quit right there, and then I’d walk around for the rest of my life, introducing myself as the guy who made “Wish.” Trent Reznor didn’t do that. After “Wish,” he made The Downward Spiral. At the Baltimore Arena, he followed “Wish” with “March Of The Pigs” and “Reptile” and “Heresy” — just banger after banger after banger. Onstage, Nine Inch Nails tended to focus more on the synthpop thump at the heart of those songs, which only made the gigantic riffs feel more transformative when they came storming in. And the hits felt endless.

“Closer” might be the definitive strip-club song of the alt-rock ’90s, but at this show, it’s the kind of thing Reznor could toss off during the synth-heavy mini-stage interlude with Boys Noize. Reznor toyed with arrangements and vocal melodies, sometimes hitting some serious notes. He wasn’t much for stage patter, but what would he need to say? The rest of the band was just ridiculously locked-in with him. As a sonic and visual spectacle, the current Nine Inch Nails show is absolutely overwhelming. My friend Nat says they’re way better live now than they were in 1995. I didn’t see them in 1995, but I believe him.

Sometimes, though, you can’t mess around with the song structures too much. “Head Like A Hole” is one such moment. I thought I was sick of “Head Like A Hole.” I thought it was right up there with “Closer” as the most overplayed Nine Inch Nails song. When I bump Pretty Hate Machine, something I still do all the time, I usually skip right to “Terrible Lie.” But when “Head Like A Hole” hit on Tuesday, holy shit. Jesus Christ. What a fucking song.

Maybe a dozen blocks north of the Baltimore Arena, my little brother got locked up in a mental ward for a few weeks once. He was in ninth grade, and he ran away from home a couple of times and got into some physical situations with my parents, so they called the police on him and had him shipped off to this place. During his time there, my brother just wanted one thing: His Pretty Hate Machine tape. My dad listened to it and freaked out. He was sure that the “bow down before the one you serve” bit was about Satan. I tried to tell him that the song was about money, it was making a point, did you even listen, etc., but I don’t think I ever got through to him. Now, my dad is dead, and my brother is doing just fine. I filmed the “bow down before the one you serve” part on my phone and texted it to him. It felt so good. Shout out to every psycho who mashed thrash metal up with disco and helped make that happen for me.