Nine Inch Nails Leap Into the AI Nightmare

Trent Reznor usually keeps his highbrow Oscar-winning soundtrack composer side relatively separate from his main gig running Nine Inch Nails. But the soundtrack he and longtime collaborator Atticus Ross have cooked up for TRON: Ares is the first time he’s ever slapped the NIN brand on his film work. The new album, the first Nine Inch Nails record in five years, finds Reznor elbow-deep in all his favorite bags: Eighties synth bellyaching, industrial-rock violence, metal machine minimalism, wintry piano miniatures, the second side of David Bowie’s Low, and the sweatiest corner of the all-ages goth club.

Of the 24 songs here, we get four with Reznor’s vocals. “As Alive As You Need Me to Be” is pure old-school Nine Inch Nails black gold — scabrous dark-sider gear grind and Reznor rhyming “infection” and “connection” in a ritual return to his great themes of power, submission, and control. The plot twist is a vocoder “yeah yeah yeah“ refrain that evokes Daft Punk soundtracking a graveyard rave. “I Know You Can Feel It” sounds like a mad Nineties grunge song eating a sad Nineties trip-hop song as Reznor delivers a hymn to predatory anticipation. The dejectedly gorgeous “Who Wants to Live Forever?” sets his forlorn moan-croon over ambient ice sheets and gets a lovely, understated duet assist from Spanish artist Judeline. And he ends the proceedings with another hunk of rage-in-a-cage doom-disco, “Shadow of Me.” Equally torrid tracks like “A Question of Trust” and “Target Identified” might’ve turned into similarly hot contributions to the NIN canon if Reznor had added vocals.

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The rest of the album is engrossing film-score flotsam. The last two Nine Inch Nails releases, 2020’s Ghosts V: Together and Ghosts VI: Locusts, saw Reznor wander into the deepest reaches of beatless abstract bleakness with surprisingly compelling results. A lot of this stuff follows the same thread, often steeped in vintage synth drones, whirrs, and buzzes that evoke the turn-of-the-Eighties sci-fi futurism the first TRON movie embodied back in 1982. Reznor is also an executive producer on the new installment of the franchise, which is about mankind’s first encounter with AI beings, and he leans into the dystopian creepiness of that concept with the titles and vibes of “Building Better Worlds” and “Empathetic Trust.” To quote one of Reznor’s alt-rock fellow travelers, we’ll make great pets.

Only a masochist would sit down and listen to the whole hour-plus of this front to back — which means it’s perfectly targeted for Nine Inch Nail’s core audience. Taken in isolation, some of its best moments — like the Erik Satie-gone-Cylon “Echoes” and the slinky, bass-bomb implosion “Infiltrator” — present nice twists on the tension between of all-too-human hunger and android angst Reznor has been playing with for decades. For the next real Nine Inch Nails record, he should go for a more fully fleshed-out balance of aggression and abstraction. We might get a new-look Downward Spiral for our times.

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