Timing may not be everything, but it’s a lot. Last Thursday, Nine Inch Nails — which currently means Trent Reznor and his partner in film scoring, Atticus Ross — released a pair of albums free online: “Ghosts V: Together,” and “Ghosts VI: Locusts.”

They’re collections of music without words, numbered as sequels to “Ghosts I-IV,” the album Nine Inch Nails released in 2008. The new “Ghosts” albums set out to address what Reznor and Ross describe in a statement as “Weird times indeed. As the news seems to turn ever more grim by the hour, we’ve found ourselves vacillating wildly between feeling like there may be hope at times to utter despair.”

The two albums push toward each polarity. “Ghosts V: Together” is largely meditative, circling through melodic patterns and touching down in consonance. The music is not entirely soothing — Nine Inch Nails doesn’t exactly do soothing — but it hints at some possibility of confluence, stability and eventual resolution. But “Ghosts VI: Locusts” offers no such sanctuary. It is harrowing from end to end, stoked with rhythmic tension, dissonance and amorphous noise: a soundscape of impending collapse and inexorable entropy.