The Slip (album) - Music and Lyrics

Music and Lyrics

Many critics noted how tracks on The Slip echoed musical stylings from the band's past, and that the record contained musical allusions to older Nine Inch Nails records. Anastasia Pantsios of the Cleveland Free Times said that "The Slip more or less sums up the terrain Reznor's covered in his nearly two-decade career", and went on to compare the album sound with the "edgy but irresistible beats" of Pretty Hate Machine and The Downward Spiral, and "the elusive atmospherics" of The Fragile. Jon Pareles of The New York Times wrote that "the music revives Nine Inch Nails’ past, from stomping hard rock to dance-club beats to piano ballad to inexorably building instrumentals." The album's final track, "Demon Seed", directly incorporates instrumental elements from the final track of the band's previous all-instrumental album Ghosts I–IV.

Ed Thompson of IGN commented that the tracks "Discipline" and "Echoplex" channeled "bits and pieces of Depeche Mode, Bauhaus, and even some Siouxsie and the Banshees". Richard Cromelin of the Los Angeles Times called The Slip "murkier and less catchy than the last couple of regular NIN albums", and added that "Reznor blends the jarring sounds of the industrial rock genre with a terse, punk-like attack, bringing an insistent, sometimes claustrophobic feel to his scenarios of alienation".

Lyrically, Eric Harvey of Pitchfork Media compared "Discipline" to one of Nine Inch Nails's first singles, "Head Like a Hole", saying " comes from a long-established and now label-free artist trying to reflexively reassert his position in the pop landscape, on his own terms. 'Discipline' evinces Reznor's desire for some sort of framework In relative terms, 'I need your discipline/ I need your help' is sure a long way from the nearly 20-year-old 'Head Like a Hole' refrain 'I'd rather die/ Than give you control'." Tom Breihan of The Village Voice reached a similar interpretation of the album's lyrical content, writing "The Slip seems to deal with Reznor's break from the corporate machine, or at least from the numbing conformity-minded forces it represents."

In commenting on the album, Reznor has said that it derived from "a weird sense of being outside in isolation and watching getting older." He also described it as "a quickly assembled album", and as "more of a sketch than a painting." Reznor compared the quick assembly of The Slip to the much longer process of creating his 1999 double album The Fragile, saying that the creation of The Slip relied more on "reflexes" and that his next project would be given more "editorial time".