With marching armies and screaming crowds, Year Zero, the new Nine Inch Nails LP, gets underway.

Trent Reznor's latest is a dark conceptual work, a prediction/warning of a Dystopian future, an America crushed under religious dictatorship.

The first two proper songs, "The Beginning Of The End" and lead-off single "Survivalism", are amongst the album's most purely rock songs, relentlessly pummeling and pouring out aggression.

Elsewhere Year Zero draws heavily on non-rock aesthetics such as hip hop and electronica, weaving them into a constant sense of menace bubbling under the surface.

It's a deeply textural sound, as befits Nine Inch Nails' aesthetic, blending prepared piano, oriental-sounding percussion and all manner of undeterminable electronic sounds into the mix.

Additionally Reznor's switching between characters (particularly his depiction of his future's corrupt president in "Capital G") calls to mind the satires of the Dead Kennedys in songs such as "California Uber Alles".

The album's sterling moment is its penultimate track, the aching "In This Twilight."

Reznor has always had a way with slowburning numbers such as this, and the song is perhaps one of his strongest songs ever, a view of the abyss with electronic shrieks like carrion birds circling overhead.

From there all that's left is to sink into the void of "Zero Sum".

Supposedly Reznor has a companion volume in the pipeline for next year.

Let's hope it proves as strong a set as this one.