Trent Reznor is back.

Back in Honolulu after a 13-year lapse, and back at the top of his game, emoting to a devoted crowd last night at Blaisdell Arena in the final show of the Nine Inch Nails world tour.

When he last stopped in Hawai'i with his band, it was 1994, and, if you believe Reznor's recollection, cold — about 60 degrees and overcast, as he remembers it.

Rapping between numbers in a candy-store set of nearly 25 songs that spanned the entire 18-year history of Nine Inch Nails, Reznor recalled his effort to be a tourist.

"We were five of the whitest, skinniest guys with combat boots on the beach, in water up to our waists, shivering, saying, 'This sucks'," he said.

"Trent," as fans in chat rooms and on NIN's interactive blog call him, is the brain behind the band's pioneering industrial sound and obsessive, angst-driven lyrics.

He won college radio listeners' hearts back in 1989 when his debut album, "Pretty Hate Machine," hit airwaves. It all fell apart with 1999's release and tour for "The Fragile." Reznor bottomed out, later entering rehab. He's since re-emerged clean, humble, strong, and with two new NIN albums, 2005's "With Teeth" and 2007's breakthrough "Year Zero."

Last night's charismatic set featured the band's current live incarnation (in studio, it's all Reznor), with guitarist Aaron North, keyboardist Alessandro Cortini, drummer Josh Freese and bassist Jeordie White. Emerging from a smoke-flooded stage, Reznor and company mixed a smattering of old licks with new.

The locked-and-loaded song-list delivered up enduring NIN themes such as sex, betrayal, power, religion and abuse.

The rounded set stretched back to "Pretty Hate Machine's" "Sin," and its anti-authority anthem, "Head Like a Hole," whose strobed opening beats amped fans and set the shirtless sound guy head-thumping to its raw catharsis.

"The Hand That Feeds," a techno-industrial-metal hybrid track from "With Teeth" with a hook, also grabbed the crowd.

There was plenty, too, of Reznor's more broadly dark new material: fictional, message-driven songs from the near-future depicted in "Year Zero," including "Survivalism," a harrowing militaristic march with chopped vocals.

"Year Zero" morphs Reznor's trademark personal narrative into grand political cyberstory, remastering the "master narrative."

It's more than a concept album on thermally activated CD: It's an interactive cybernarrative, harnessing the Internet with a game that plays out through a linked labyrinth of hidden Web pages, an Art-is-Resistance movement, and free downloadable tracks for fans to remix and post on a communal Web site. That's a bold statement about ownership, art and democracy — no doubt maddening to music industry execs and the satirical "Bureau of Morality" the disc's back cover cites.

Songs like "Me, I'm Not" and "The Great Destroyer" from Reznor's multilayered, apocalyptic prequel, played last night against a pixilated screen backdrop, were practically synesthetic performance pieces. Bleeding in and out of screen, Reznor became apparition, machine, labor propaganda poster, prisoner, mad scientist and poignantly fragile human.

Later, when yellow floodlights illuminated the crowd during "Suck" from 1992's "Broken," the writhing pit looked like a beehive — a delicious image for the master-drone system archetype that "Year Zero" lambastes.

The night's biggest surprise? The man can SING. Reznor's wire-strung vocals have loosened into a range that verged, at moments, on old-time soul. During "Piggy," lifted from 1994's innovative "The Downward Spiral," the soul singer became also perverse choirmaster to fans.

Over the course of the show, not just the typical clothing was flung offstage, but also a tambourine, guitarist (North) while wielding guitar, and, in the end, a keyboard.

As encore, Reznor sang "Hurt" (famously reinterpreted in Johnny Cash's ragged, perfectly phrased cover), a song he's said doesn't seem like his anymore. But last night, Cash's eulogy became Reznor's return.

Performing on a stripped-down stage, behind a screen that resembled Whistler's night sky, Reznor both did homage to Cash and took it back. When he sang, "I am still right here," some cheers had nothing to do with his chicken-skin rendition.

It's a happy ending, and beginning, for Reznor.

In a corporate musical age of manufactured stars, piracy, destructive diversions and mainstream "alternative" bands, he's managed to stay compelling, and alive.

And he's done it on his terms: "Year Zero" explodes the idea of radio-friendly pop discs, expanding the concept of the musical narrative and kicking against an industry that controls artists to their own peril — but rarely mourns its statistics.

Fans who speak wistfully of the "old Trent" — the haggard Goth, the hopped-up icon who hated the world but himself more — don't see that's not just a personal victory for Reznor, it's one for music fans.

If industrial rock's grown up with him, and now uses the channels it once destroyed in song to resist, that's not selling out: It's the height of subversion.