Timing may not be everything, but it is a lot.
Last Thursday, Nine Inch Nails - which comprise Trent Reznor and his partner in film scoring, Atticus Ross - released a pair of free albums online: Ghosts V: Together and Ghosts VI: Locusts.
They are collections of music without words, numbered as sequels to Ghosts I-IV, the album Nine Inch Nails released in 2008.
The new Ghosts albums (The Null Corporation) set out to address what Reznor and Ross describe in a statement as "Weird times indeed. As the news seems to turn ever more grim by the hour, we've found ourselves vacillating wildly between feeling like there may be hope at times to utter despair".
The two albums push towards each polarity. Ghosts V: Together is largely meditative, circling through melodic patterns and touching down in consonance.
The music is not entirely soothing - Nine Inch Nails does not exactly do soothing - but it hints at some possibility of confluence, stability and eventual resolution.
But Ghosts VI: Locusts offers no such sanctuary. It is harrowing from end to end, stoked with rhythmic tension, dissonance and amorphous noise: a soundscape of impending collapse and inexorable entropy.
Of course, these are not new elements for Nine Inch Nails. Reznor has juxtaposed melody and abrasion, structure and deterioration, since he released the first Nine Inch Nails album, Pretty Hate Machine, in 1989.
There is even stronger continuity between the new Ghosts albums and the film scores he has lately been making with Ross - particularly Gone Girl (2014), Bird Box (2018) and parts of Watchmen (2019).
Reznor has long been one of the most psychologically acute composer-producers. In both songs and instrumentals, his fanatically detailed arrangements map shifting emotional territory as well as musical foundations.
He and Ross revisit some of their most distinctive sonic vocabulary on the new albums.
There are piano notes that seem to echo across ruined spaces, sustained electronic tones that curdle aggressively into distortion, dense but distant orchestral thickets, "instruments" with an acoustic core that have been so heavily manipulated that they are no longer recognisable as physical sources.
In Nine Inch Nails songs and film music, Reznor has always sculpted sounds that are suitable for suspense and horror scenarios and, right now, those sounds can feel very much of the moment.
The piano notes toll in hollow isolation and the distortion can swell as suddenly and unpredictably as an infection. And those orchestral hazes hover like an impending outbreak. On the two Ghosts albums, Nine Inch Nails allows itself a rare luxury: duration.
The album tracks are not confined to song forms or the limitations and external expectations of soundtrack music cues. They can, and do, stretch to 10, 11, even 13 minutes.
There is time for slower tempos, for leisurely exposition, for elaborate textural variation and for nuanced, near-subliminal sound layering.
There is time to introduce thematic material, wander away from it, then let it waft back in from an unexpected direction - or to let something new arrive and obliterate what came before.
Where Ghosts I-IV used only numbers, the new Ghosts albums also have track titles. It is another way for Reznor to calibrate listener expectations.
Sometimes, cacophony looms up and drowns out whatever the instruments are doing; and sometimes - as in the album's finale, Almost Dawn - a shard of melody peeks out to take its chances against noise and oblivion.
On both albums, as in so many lives right now, there is no way to wall off aspiration from dread.
NYTIMES
