Year Zero. Now.

I love a lot of bands but there is only one music artist's bumper sticker on the back of my car. It's an N, an I, and a backwards N. You follow me and you know that I love Nine Inch Nails. Whenever I drive south on I-65 near Brentwood, I recall the first time I heard bits of Reznor's Pretty Hate Machine in an NPR story about the frenzied and emotional industrial sound of his creation.

Not all of his music has hit me the way that Pretty Hate Machine did. I bought that tape that very afternoon and kept it playing in my tape deck for damn near a month straight. While he has experimented successfully with making incredible sounding music since, no complete album of his has been sounded as emotionally desperate as that first release.

Well, here I am with goosebumps listening to 2007's Year Zero. So far, it's raw and furious and needy as hell. Listen to it here. Don't answer phones or open doors. Turn off your television and focus on what may be the best Nine Inch Nails album in a long, long time. Visceral anguish is all over this. The beats are nasty and sexy and don't care about you. But the singer's words regret, and they want, and they reach out with long, skinny arms, pleading for love and compassion. There is the balance.

Year Zero is as complete as 1989's Pretty Hate Machine and as sexy as 1994's "Closer To God." It's minimalism with swagger and lust. It's about the future and paranoia as we all inch through the meat grinder together while singing along to "God Given." Year Zero hits the streets on April 17. It'll be mid-May before I listen to anything other than this genius release.

Again, it's here.