Nine Inch Nails' current lineup is, from left, Aaron North, Josh Freese, Trent Reznor, Alessandro Cortini and Jeordie White.

By Gelu Sulugiuc In the early '90s, Trent Reznor, Kurt Cobain and Billy Corgan reigned over the alternative rock charts with their respective bands. Now, more than a decade later, Nirvana's Cobain is dead, and Corgan has long ceased to cause kids to stampede to the record stores to buy the latest Smashing Pumpkins CD.

Reznor, on the other hand, has returned from a six-year break from music to find that his furious industrial rock based on jagged guitars, booming drums, jarring keyboards and desperate vocals is as relevant as ever.

		Nine Inch Nails With: Bauhaus, Peaches. Where: Post-Gazette Pavilion. When: 7 p.m. Friday. Tickets: $20 to $49.50; 412-323-1919.

The Grammy-winning performer behind Nine Inch Nails conquered depression, alcohol and drug abuse and managed to return to the spotlight last year with a new album, "With Teeth," that debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard chart and received rapturous press reviews.

His first tour sold out quickly and Reznor, a Mercer native, is now back for a second run, stopping at the Post-Gazette Pavilion on Friday.

But when he was recording "With Teeth," his first album since 1999's "The Fragile," the moody but charismatic Reznor had no clue whether anybody still had an appetite for his brutal sound and dark lyrics.

"The culture, the times, the people and the business have changed," he says. "I had a new excuse to fight: what if I can't write sober, what if I don't have anything to say, what if I'm irrelevant, what if I'm just old now, what if it was just an accident that I got popular in the first place? The time between my last two records, although not a calculated career move, may have benefited me because it skipped certain whole subgenres of really bad music. But I didn't go into this record cycle assuming that I had all the power that I once wielded."

The acclaim "With Teeth" received rekindled Reznor's desire to continue to make music and has kept him on tour much longer than he ever expected.

"I have confidence that I'm working with myself now instead of against myself," he says. "I can't tell you how inspirational that feels and how in love with music again I am. Somehow I lost that and forgot why I was doing this and it became a job, a hassle."

To the dismay of his critics, staying sober hasn't been a problem for Reznor.

"My priorities have shifted," he says. "I really want to make the two hours on stage the best two hours I have that day. In the past, those were a pretty good two hours, but the three hours after that were going to be even better."

Despite the renewed self-confidence, Reznor still had a few obstacles to overcome. Drummer Jerome Dillon was dropped from the band in the middle of the tour's first leg last year after he missed a few shows with what was initially thought to be heart trouble but turned out not to be a medical emergency. Reznor's planned triumphant return to New Orleans, where he had lived for more than 12 years before moving to Los Angeles, was canceled by Hurricane Katrina.

But Reznor pressed on, finding a new drummer quickly and convincing promoters to reinstate his New Orleans show as a free performance for relief workers at the Voodoo Music Experience festival last Halloween.

"I've missed New Orleans since I've moved to Los Angeles," he says. "It's a very flawed place, but I spent a lot of time there. I really got to know myself there. It's been shocking to see what's happened to it. I've been grieving the loss of a place, because it will never be the same."

Since then, he made his band even stronger by adding the most in-demand rock drummer alive, Josh Freese, a regular member of The Vandals and A Perfect Circle who also has played with everybody from Sting to Seether.

"I like the feeling that I've got a great show and a great band and an interesting presentation that I think isn't rock show by numbers," Reznor says. "I put a lot of thought and different layers in the presentation to frame the music in an interesting way in an arena environment. It feels good being backstage knowing that you're about to unleash that on people.

"What I don't like about it is the length of time and the tedium that inevitably crops up doing the same thing day in day out, moving around constantly. My routine is messed up."

This has led Reznor into a constant fight against boredom on and off the stage, as if he has to prove to himself over and over that his rock career is still worth pursuing.

"I designed a show that could use the scale of an arena and reveal itself over time and it doesn't get tedious to watch," he says. "I've tried to make it something that visually can support the music. I'm using these props as a framework so that I can get across a range of emotions and have a set that starts in one place and winds up in another. It's like watching a film or a play, that's the mission. My goal is to make it so you don't have time to go to the bathroom during the show."

At the end of the day, what seems to matter most to him is for him and his live show not to devolve into a nostalgia act.

"It doesn't feel like I'm playing a role, it feels relevant and true to me, as much as I can tell," Reznor says. "Admittedly, I can't be that objective, but one of the big fears putting the tour together was about the older music. Does that mean anything to me anymore? Do I feel comfortable singing some of these songs? We spent a lot of time learning the new record and then moving backwards in time and finding things that felt good. And I can honestly say looking at the set list that I can't wait to play these songs."

And so Reznor continues to put on his usual overpowering show, roaming the stage nightly like a man possessed under the blinding glare of the background lights that pulse rhythmically to the music.

"Nine Inch Nails has always had a theatrical quality, and in the '90s that wasn't necessarily looked at as a legitimate thing in the world of blue jeans and flannel shirts," Reznor says. "I've always felt like a performer should be and could be larger than life without being comical and goofy -- it doesn't have to be Gene Simmons, you know."

The audience has flocked to his shows, with older fans filling up venues alongside a whole new generation of teenage fans that discovered Nine Inch Nails while Reznor was shunning the spotlight, dealing with his troubled psyche.

"That feels great," Reznor says. "I'm not trying to sound humbled, but when I finished this record, I didn't know how much time passed and how much things are different culturally than they were [in the '90s]. It's been a pleasant reception and I'm grateful for that.

"I felt like Nine Inch Nails got much bigger than I ever dreamed it could get, and I told myself that the reason that happened was that at its core it was honest and true and, luckily, it happened to strike a nerve with people. If I ever pandered to that, to the dollar or commercial sales not listening to what the artist in me has to say, I think that's just death. Throughout my career, throughout getting sick and disappearing for a while, I can sleep at night feeling like I've always done what I really thought was the best I can do, like it or hate it, but it never was for the wrong reasons."