“Damn you Trent Reznor, you ruined Christmas.”
It’s a holiday tradition in the industrial music scene: every December, the same comic resurfaces in group chats and timelines: Trent Reznor barging into the familiar consumerist fantasy of Christmas to tear it apart. Be good, behave yourself, buy in, and Santa will come down the chimney with rewards.
It’s a terrible lie!
That tension has long tethered Nine Inch Nails to the season. Fans have linked Head Like a Hole to Christmas since 1989, when Reznor appeared on MTV’s 120 Minutes holiday broadcast, slipping industrial dissent into the tinsel-lined schedule. The song’s warning: bow down before the one you serve, cuts through the seasonal morality play with a clean blade.
…But indeed, if Greed is the God you serve, well, Christmas keeps another custom close at hand. You don’t get presents, you get visited by ghosts.
Too Much Light (Jenny Kirby, Sean Keane, and Parris Florence) seizes that shared shorthand and presses it into sharper relief. Their new video stages an anti-capitalist collision between Head Like a Hole and Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Power, obedience, ritual: all dragged into the same cold room and told to answer for themselves.
Too Much Light came together in late 2024 as a fully integrated audio-visual project, steeped in synth-driven pop, industrial pressure, and gothic theatre. Dickens’ tale dissects how wealth hardens into identity, how comfort is purchased through cruelty, and how society smiles with their consumerist greed and calls it a holiday tradition. Reznor’s song frames obedience as danger. The moral framework is shared; Too Much Light closes the gap and lets the parallels bruise.
Directed by Erik Gustafson (Adoration Destroyed), with production design by Kirby (Borg Queen), the video unfolds inside a claustrophobic Victorian interior: parlour turned pressure chamber. Burlap-clad figures slump beneath garlands and lampshades, chains clatter, and the classic specters barge into the scene. At the centre, a miser, equal parts Scrooge and industrial overlord, meets his fate.
Shot over two days in Kirby’s living room with a low budget and thrifted/handmade costume (no Shein TikTok hauls here!), the hilarious low-budget video is an entertaining watch. What makes the collision work is its inevitability. Head Like a Hole has always treated submission as violence rather than virture; A Christmas Carol exposes the same mechanism through wealth and ritualized morality. In this video, capitalism itself becomes just another Christmas ghost: inescapable, omnipresent, and disguised as seasonal comfort.
Watch the video below:
The critique is pointed, but the pleasure is undeniable. Stylish, funny, and knowingly absurd, the video understands that even anti-capitalist sermons land easier when wrapped in tinsel and theatrics. It’s the kind of spectacle that can still thaw the heart of even the most hardened old goth or Scrooge—something like catching Trent Reznor mid-smile during Head Like a Hole while Santa crowdsurfs the pit.
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The post Head Like a Ho Ho Hole? — Too Much Light Mashes Up Nine Inch Nails With “A Christmas Carol” in Anti-Capitalist Holiday Music Video appeared first on Post-Punk.com.
