Recorded directly via computers while Nine Inch Nails was mostly on the road for the With Teeth tour and released just two years after that album, Year Zero was one of Trent Reznor’s most ambitious efforts yet, a full-on concept record imagining a near future US dystopia shaped by the wider sociopolitical events of the time. In lesser hands it might have stumbled but thanks to Reznor’s ever-present sense of groove, mood and hooks, songs like “Capital G,” “Survivalism” and “God Given” were simultaneously instant earworms and unnerving visions.

– Ned Raggett