Nine Inch Nails
BOK Center
February 27, 2026
There’s a thought-experiment game I like to play called “Favorite, Best, Greatest,” where pop culture entries are sorted along those lines. Favorite means the player’s personal favorite. Best means the best in a genre. Greatest carries the distinction of breaking down barriers and furthering a genre while also being really, really good. Think of The Sopranos as Greatest for TV, and The Wire as Best. No Tony? No Omar.
This game tends to piss some people off, as my television statement above probably did, and the next sentence definitely will: Nine Inch Nails might be the Greatest American rock band. Sure, Van Halen started the guitar arms race that defined ’80s metal, my favorite era of my favorite genre. Metallica pushed thrash into neoclassical, ultra-compositional territory and moved metal from clubs to suburban TV screens. And Nirvana launched a S.C.U.D. at the ivory towers of both. But Nine Inch Nails turned synthesizers, vulnerability, gender fluidity, and dance music into the true machines that kill fascists. As evidenced by their recent BOK show, they are also still really, really good.
This isn’t the place to detail NIN’s storied career, but it starts with a sad goth boy from Cleveland and involves heroin, David Lynch and David Bowie, sobriety, the most popular (and danceable) blasphemic paean to rough sex, the ingenious use of technology, and award-winning film scores, including for Disney/Pixar. When I had to download an app to pay for my 400% surge-priced parking space outside the BOK Center, I knew Woodstock ’94 Trent would hate the world that Year Zero Trent prophesied. That 2007 title was a concept album about a dystopian techno-theocracy that rallied the young into war with propaganda extolling a doomsday cult of sorts. Just let Secretary of War Pete Hegseth open his mouth for a few seconds and you’ll see where I’m going with that.
But where has NIN gone now that their satire is reality? They’ve come back to the synth.
German-Iraqi DJ Boys Noize opened the show in one of the most iconic arena setups I can recall, with his booth behind the crowd, opposite the shrouded stage, and an ominous Kaaba formed of suspended black drapes hanging in the middle of the packed arena. Boys Noize sliced through a selection of original tracks and dark dance classics (like Depeche Mode’s “Enjoy The Silence,” which I’d classify as one of the Greatest goth anthems ever) before the cloth cube dropped to reveal Reznor and his bandmate and film score collaborator, Atticus Ross, standing at crowd center in a stripped-down synthesizer lab.
The name of this tour, “Peel It Back,” refers to this minimal setup designed to showcase the duo’s contemplative soundtrack work and NIN’s minimalist meditations. Functioning as double entendre, the moniker also references the soft piano section of NIN’s anarchic track “March of the Pigs,” which the full band soon ripped into on the main stage.