Nine Inch Nails' Tension tour isn't a typical arena rock show. Whereas most artists with a similar level of success and resources aim for spectacle, the execution tends to be very predictable – a few signature set pieces offset by a lot of basic lighting effects, half-hearted video elements on big screens, and maybe some pyrotechnics. In most cases, it's all purely functional, and simply places an emphasis on musical moments in the show. Nine Inch Nails' show, however, takes a more holistic approach, with the visual presentation constantly shifting to imply distinct environments for each song in the set while advancing an overall structure that's more like a film than a concert. Though other recent tours by Kanye West and Lady Gaga may have a bigger, bolder set design, the NIN show is far more visually versatile and more complete in its design, with all the dimensions of the stage serving as a canvas for digital art that would seem more at home at, say, MoMA or The New Museum, than a rock concert.

Nine Inch Nails mastermind Trent Reznor told BuzzFeed he's motivated to put on this sort of elaborate show as a matter of artistic expression, but also out of a sense of responsibility to his audience. "My goal is that — I can usually see the audience because I'm lit from behind a lot — is that I want to keep you from looking at your phone," Reznor said. "I want to make you hold your pee because you don't want to miss something. We've thought about all this stuff, and want to make this experience something that was worth your time."

Tension is the result of a long term collaboration between Reznor and the band's art director, Rob Sheridan. The production follows the basic template of Lights in the Sky, a 2008 tour that Reznor and Sheridan agree was the pinnacle of the band's live presentation, and the culmination of nearly a decade of experimentation. "We accidentally came up with physical light structures and a template where we could milk a lot out of it, and by the end of it, we'd run out of time and resources to keep going and it never felt like we finished it," Reznor said of the Lights in the Sky tour. "We had these transparent screens that gave us a strange sense of depth and immersiveness, depending on what we put on it. We could turn the stage into something that felt more alive."

"It was really impressive, but it was also on the tail end of a long, long time of touring around North America, so it didn't have the hype and the impact we wished it would have when we got it out there," said Sheridan, who oversees the overall design for the Tension tour and has been working closely with Reznor since he was hired to design the band's official website when he was a teenager in the late '90s, having never picked up a camera or edited video in his life. "It was kinda only seen by really hardcore fans, so that became part of the impetus for going back to it, because we just want lots of people to see what we can do. You don't want to go out on tour with a production that's new for the sake of being new."