Billboard 200: #2
UK Albums Chart: #9
Australian Album chart: #12
New Zealand. #23
The Downward Spiral was released March 1994. The album debuted the following week at number two on the Billboard album charts. The album was well-received by critics. Jon Pareles of The New York Times wrote, "Every instrument, acoustic or synthetic, seems tuned to create the maximum aural abrasion," Pareles asserted that unlike other industrial groups like Ministry and Nitzer Ebb, "Reznor writes full-fledged tunes; he knows his way around melodic hooks, not just riffs. And while purists accuse him of selling out their insular genres, he actually trumps them; the music is no less transgressive, and possibly more so, because it sticks in the ear." Robert Christgau said that, musically, the album was comparable to "Heironymus Bosch as postindustrial atheist", but lyrically, more closely resembled "Transformers as kiddie porn."
Rolling Stone awarded the album four out of five stars; reviewer Jonathan Gold praised the album as "music that pins playback levels far into the red", and concluded, "The Downward Spiral is music the blade runner might throw down to: low-tech futurism that rocks." Entertainment Weekly gave the album a B+; reviewer Tom Sinclair wrote, "Reznor's pet topics (sex, power, S&M, hatred, transcendence) are all here, wrapped in hooks that hit your psyche with the force of a blowtorch."
The album was ranked at number 25 in Spin's "100 Greatest Albums, 1985-2005", Spin also ranked it 11th on their "Top 90 Albums of the 90's ". Blender named it the 80th Greatest American Album. It was ranked #488 in the book The Top 500 Heavy Metal Albums of All Time by Martin Popoff. In 2001 Q named The Downward Spiral as one of the 50 Heaviest Albums Of All Time. In 2003, the album was ranked number 200 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time.