By Sidney Dills, Diversions Editor

Nine Inch Nails’s eighth studio album, “Hesitation Marks,” misses the mark and fails at making any lasting progress into the future of music.

The album starts with a bass-filled instrumental piece that is reminiscent of the slow, melodic sound of previous Nine Inch Nails albums.

This quickly turns around in track two, “Copy of A,” when the band starts sounding like trance music mixed with bad, fast-paced Radiohead. “Find My Way,” the fourth song on the album, sounds like a nursery rhyme with its repetition of four rhyming lines. The song’s music is as repetitive as the lyrics and doesn’t really seem to fit in with the rest of the album, excepting the prominent rhyming in most of the songs.

“All Time Low” makes me hopeful of a return to Nine Inch Nails’s roots in rock, but after this track, there is no hope, as the album continues to follow its wannabe trance and club state with no trace of rock or bass-filled melodies. The only redeeming quality of this album is the occasional experimental instrumentals.

Overall, this album is not worth the listen unless you like trance or slow club music. I’d expect that previous Nine Inch Nails fans will be disappointed with what they hear as the band journeys into new but unpleasant musical terrain.