@janecoaston on Twitter I have an ongoing theory that Taylor Swift songs are Nine Inch Nails songs for people who don’t like industrial and “Anti-Hero” is basically a bizarro The Fragile track
Heresy is a little awkward in that unlike Trent at the time, you know Marilyn Manson comes afterwards
And on an iPhone speaker A Warm Place sounds like lesser 16-bit Squaresoft BGM
Overall thoughts:
Basically, someone who lived through the ensuing decades of music could’ve made this on a 1997 Mac.
Like zoom out and you can even kinda tell where one sample begins and ends, which you already couldn’t by Butch Vig and Garbage
To the extent Trent prefigures later cringe boy stuff it’s not edgy so much as proto-emo, which honestly makes both the later buff phase and the friendship with Tori Amos funnier
Like there are definitely some boy-at-the-college-feminist-slam-poetry-event themes in this exploration of inner pain
