This summer, Nine Inch Nails and Soundgarden will join forces as they head out on a co-headling US tour that will reach the Philly area at the end of July. The tour will mark the 20th anniversary of the last time the two superpowers of rock shared a stage. It was 1994 at Ontario’s Molson Park, an event that Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor would later call “a kind of professional showdown.” Both bands had released an album on the same day that year and they became instant rivals. The albums were The Downward Spiral (Nine Inch Nails) and Superunknown (Soundgarden); albums that would become the most important and successful for each of the eventual legends.
The Downward Spiral was only Nine Inch Nails’ second studio album, but it debuted at number 2 on the Billboard 200. To this day, the album remains the highest-selling Nine Inch Nails record. Housing songs like the megahit “Closer,” it’s easy to see why this album received the acclaim and continued success that it has seen. The Downward Spiral, proved to be just the opposite for NIN, as it only served to push them further into the mainstream, with its frontman going on to write the scores for Oscar and Grammy nominated films. The album itself has continuously been ranked as one of the greatest albums of all time. As the only official member of NIN, that success is due to none other than Trent Reznor. In 1997, Reznor was unsurprisingly named one of Time Magazine‘s most influential people.
Soundgarden, one of the early influencers of grunge, received its biggest success as a result of their 1994 release, Superunknown. The album debuted at number one on Billboard and won the band two Grammys for singles “Black Hole Sun” and “Spoonman”. The band broke up in 1997 due to internal conflicts, but reunited in 2010 and released King Animal two years later. And just this past week, Soundgarden performed, for the first time, the album that catapulted their success (Superunknown) in its entirety as part of the iTunes Festival at SXSW. There are also plans to release a 5-disc 20th anniversary edition at the beginning of June.
Opening for the rock legends this summer will be the experimental hip hop group Death Grips. Join all three when they hit the stage for what is sure to be one of the best concerts of the summer.
Nine Inch Nails & Soundgarden w/ Death Grips @ Susquehanna Bank Center
Wednesday, July 30
Show @ 7:00 PM
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