/BLEEDTHROUGH

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Bleedthrough is an attempt to fabricate an album that could have been. Featuring original art, re-sequenced audio, and a music video, the project is meant to feel like an artifact from an alternate history; something that looks real and feels real, but shouldn’t exist.

In 2004, Nine Inch Nails announced their forthcoming album, what would eventually become 2005’s With Teeth. Trent Reznor pitched the album as “twelve good punches to the face”. The record would explore “loss and possible discovery of self, along with alternate layers of reality and perception set inside a nightmare you can’t seem to wake up from; with lots of feedback.” The concept and its title, Bleedthrough, were abandoned in favor of a record that would become a resounding critical and commercial success.
More than a decade later, the band released an EP revisiting that same era. Reznor asked a bleak hypothetical with Not the Actual Events: what if he hadn’t gotten clean? What if he hadn’t started a family? Again; loss and possible discovery of self. Less than a year later Reznor released Add Violence, parallel-processing anxieties about the world and the idea that it might just be a simulation. The EP pointedly ends with talk of a background world “always bleeding through.” Again; alternate layers of reality and perception. Bleedthrough may have been abandoned as an album, but its themes had become a throughline in the band’s body of work.

As a project, Bleedthrough’s goal is disorientation. Presented with as little context as possible outside of this site, it should leave its audience wondering whether it’s real. And what that means.