MANILA, Philippines—Wednesday night, 22 years after it came to life, Nine Inch Nails finally got to perform on our shores. The concert, promoted by independent online music channel Splintr.com and held at the Araneta Coliseum, was amazing and proved that, while many bands often flame out too soon, NIN remains as formidable a sonic force as when it achieved its commercial peak in the 1990s.

Credit mainly goes to NIN’s now 44-year-old frontman-singer-songwriter-multi-instrumentalist, Trent Reznor. Upon founding NIN, Reznor wound up playing all but the drums in the studio, and this Prince-like, one-man-army work ethic has marked his recordings ever since.

His fastidiousness also explains how NIN has hardly lost its edge onstage, as we saw at the Big Dome. Sporting close-cropped hair, black shirt, black leather pants and flaunting a burly build worthy of a UFC fighter, Reznor dished out one hell of a booming, floor-pounding 24-song set with three other musicians (four if we count the unseen, uncredited dude who played the pre-recorded music and impromptu effects on certain tunes).

The show, part of NIN’s ongoing “Wave Goodbye” tour, has become a yearlong engagement that Reznor says could be the band’s final tour so he can concentrate on more recordings and other ventures. The ever curt, unsmiling Reznor is not one for onstage small talk; his lone attempt at humor was to quip that drummer Ilan Rubin “had his own Michael Jackson smoke machine,” referring to the thick cloud of dry ice over the drum kit.

It was good that Reznor decided to play much of NIN’s better-known tunes instead of, say, concentrating on the contents of 2008’s “The Slip.”

Delighted local fans reveled in the ear-splitting volume—their heads banging as they screamed along in songs like “Somewhat Damaged,” “Terrible Lie,” “Heresy,” “Burn,” “Closer,” “Reptile,” “The Hand That Feeds” and “Head Like a Hole,” as well as “Echoplex.”

While that set list was technically a sampling of pretty much every NIN album, it was moreover a worthy representation of both Reznor’s industrial-meets-pop sound (aggressive, machine-aping noise with a rhythmic, verse-chorus-verse template) and lyrical nihilism (bitter antagonism towards God and authority figures), and an overall tone of doom and desperation that, while less controversial by now, remains thought-provoking and not for impressionable minds.

Coincidentally, as Reznor was winding down with “Hurt,” where he sings, “Everyone I know goes away in the end,” Cory Aquino was being laid to rest.

Even if the Internet yields numerous videos of NIN’s gigs, those do not compare to witnessing the in-your-face intensity of Reznor, guitarist Robin Finck, bassist Justin Meldal-Johnsen and drummer Rubin (who all took turns as keyboard players as well). It helped that the lighting effects (toned down from the video walls of NIN shows elsewhere) were as furious and massive as the music. But it was the band and its crisp, voluminous noise that truly enveloped the rapturous audience.

As Reznor himself put it in one of the gig’s best moments, after playing the sardonic “March of the Pigs”: Now, doesn’t that make you feel better?”