I want to take a moment to share my appreciation for Right Where it Belongs. Lately I've been coming back to With Teeth, and I'm feeling a newly-discovered affection for it. Don't get me wrong, I loved it when I first heard it, and listened to it to death. But it didn't stick with me the way the previous albums had. Or so I thought.
A bit of background: With Teeth came out in 2005, when I was halfway through my first year of university. I'd moved out from home and to a different country to study. I was already a NIN fan, having first bought Things Falling Apart and The Fragile 5 years earlier, and quickly catching up with the discography after that. I loved NIN: I started listening right at the time I was forming my own identity and sense of who I was and wanted to be, and those albums really affected me. I would listen to The Fragile every night as I went to sleep, and it's a testament to that album's layering and composition that I can still find something new in that album, 25 years and hundreds of listens on.
There was so much excitement in the NIN fan community in the run-up to With Teeth. NIN lore suggested there would be a new album in 2004 (there were 5 years between The Downward Spiral and The Fragile, so it stood to reason that the new album would be out 5 years after The Fragile, right?). Trent and Rob (Sheridan) had been teasing us with updates to the official website: the new album was called Bleedthrough, it was going to be more raw sounding than The Fragile, less dense. We had already had the live album And All That Could Have Been and a surprise companion release with that: Still, a collection of stripped-down versions of some NIN songs plus a few new original pieces. And the original tracks were heartbreaking. They felt open and honest and they were crushing. Would Bleedthrough be a continuation of that style?
Then things went a bit quiet, and all of the sudden the nin.com teasers disappeared. Then a new update: the new album wasn't going to be called Bleedthrough anymore, its new name was With Teeth.
NIN dropped The Hand That Feeds not long afterwards, and that set the scene for my expectations. I got With Teeth the day it came out and devoted the rest of the day to listening to it
I loved it. It didn't hit me the same way as The Fragile or The Downward Spiral, but it spoke immediately to the kind of things I was going through at the time. I was away from home, studying, trying to find myself. I had recently gone through a break-up that had shaken me, and I was feeling lost. This album came at the perfect time. I was in a bad place and this album was there with me through it.
The first time I heard Right Where it Belongs, it all clicked.
As I was coming out of that space, I stopped listening to With Teeth because it was too connected to those life events. It took a few years to shake that off.
Right Where it Belongs still makes me tear up though. Now it reminds me that I got through those times, and that I'm still here.
