Since its inception in 1988 as the brainchild of Trent Reznor, Nine Inch Nails have taken various non-commercial elements and counter-cultural components; songs about pain, anguish, existential confusion, power, control and submission, and combined them with noise rock, electronic dance music, and industrial rhythms, and then forged on an anvil into pop culture shapes for the goth-glam-rave set. Almost forty years on, Reznor and the only other long-term collaborator in the band, British composer Atticus Ross, are in one of their most fertile periods. As with their Bush-era treatise "Year Zero", the current political climate has charged their music once more. In interview with The Guardian, the band's frontman recounts surviving infamy, drug addiction, and a foray into tech, but in the years since has transferred his self-loathing for shame at the state of the nation, "Trent Reznor: ‘You’re Seeing the Fall of America in Real Time’". There are still glimmers of Reznor's self-focused egocentrism, a clear nod to such nepotistic tendencies can be seen in How to Destroy Angels, his band with his wife. But these are overshadowed by an intensified razor-focus on social unease and the disintegration of reciprocal faith seen in society, corporations, its citizenry and its workers. There have also been recent moments of deep personal loss and reflection, like their heartfelt cover of David Bowie’s "I Can’t Give Everything Away". Bowie’s final album "Blackstar" and its use of jazz elements alongside electronics, significantly influenced Nine Inch Nails' most recent mini-album "Bad Witch", with Reznor going further by saying; “If it wasn’t for him, we wouldn’t be here,”.
Rather than a new album, Reznor, Ross, Alessandro Cortini, Ilan Rubin, and Robin Finck will be embarking on this year's Peel It Back Tour on their series of recent EPs. "Not the Actual Events", the first in this trilogy of concise releases, was followed by 2017's "Add Violence", and the aforementioned "Bad Witch". Speaking with NME, Reznor said; "When we did "Not the Actual Events", we were kind of throwing the stylistic focus of the "Hesitation Marks" album out the window and being unafraid to explore approaches we have in the past". Shortly afterward, with the cultural setbacks of the coronavirus pandemic, they also launched into a series of instrumental, richly substantial environmental landscapes, anthologized and released as, “Ghosts I-IV”. As a response to the moment, “Nine Inch Nails Faced the Pandemic With Hope, Despair and Noise”, making these works available as cost-free downloadable content, the series of Ghosts continued into the pandemic with "Ghosts V: Together", and "Ghosts VI: Locusts". Alongside these new EPs and extended instrumental works, in recent years Reznor and Ross have established themselves as the collaborators of choice for such directors as, Nicole Kassell, Ken Burns, David Fincher, and Luca Guadagnino, composing soundtracks for both film and television. Few would have predicted "Trent Reznor’s Upward Spiral" as this bold mid-career reinvention for the cinema. Riding on these successes, the duo are now thinking in an even wider scope, and imagining an artistic empire which includes festival curation, such as this November's Future Ruins in Los Angeles. Indeed, in recent years it seems as though, "Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross Have a Plan to Soundtrack Everything". Photo credit: Rob Sheridan.
