Trent Reznor has spent his summer on stages around Europe and North America shouting the words “fist fuck” to big cheers. He’s playing a song he once used to soundtrack a video of a man’s penis being sliced off with a razor blade; the actual music video—the one they could play on TV—was shot in the house where Sharon Tate was murdered. Yes, he still says he wants to fuck you like an animal, this 60-year-old father of five.
It’s not unusual for rock stars to keep playing the music that made them rich and famous once they’re well past the point of believability and Reznor’s evolution into health-goth poet laureate and avatar of spooky respectability now accounts for nearly half of his career. He’s a Tony away from the EGOT, something not yet achieved by any other former tourmate of the Jim Rose Circus. The music is still dark—“Hurt” doesn’t stop being “Hurt” just because the guy who wrote it got his life together—but it no longer feels threatening. So much so that the idea to credit the Tron: Ares score to Nine Inch Nails, rather than to Reznor and his composing partner and bandmate Atticus Ross, came from the president of Disney Music himself.
This is, obviously, savvy branding: What other film franchise can boast scores by three of the most important artists in electronic music history, with Nine Inch Nails joining Wendy Carlos’ work on the original Tron in 1982 and Daft Punk’s take on Tron: Legacy over a decade ago. While Reznor is now the kind of guy who casually uses the term “IP” when talking about movies, he’s always had a nous for the importance of image-building. From the very start, all Nine Inch Nails releases have been branded with a Halo number, a way of symbolically stamping the music as belonging to NIN’s main body of work. Tron: Ares is Halo 36, the first of their scores to be catalogued as such; it’s also Null 22, the designation reserved for film work.
The question of what makes Tron: Ares a Nine Inch Nails record, rather than a Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross score, is the kind of thing fans have been arguing over and inflating the importance of for decades; the conversation has simply moved from alt.music.nin to r/nin. But it’s a question the record begs of itself. Does it have the weird aura of a true Nine Inch Nails project, the thing that makes all art feel like art, or is it competently produced work for hire?
It’s not difficult to understand the potential personal appeal of Tron: Ares to Reznor. He recently said he was attracted to how the film plays with “the concept of artificial life infused with feelings and emotions and a sense of questioning their purpose and their replaceability—their lack of soul, in some ways.” This is a man whose most famous album tracks a technology-addled descent into extreme alienation. The Downward Spiral is about watching your own soul shrivel up; The Fragile is about stomping it into dust. In a fun trick, Reznor’s removing his own name from the Tron: Ares spine renders it more personal and suggests we should take it more seriously than we otherwise might, something Reznor is shrewd enough to know, regardless of whether he feels that way about the music itself.
Working with Ross—the only other permanent member of Nine Inch Nails—and tour opener Boys Noize, as well as Hudson Mohawke, Reznor takes his cues from the sleek, brutalist cyberpunk aesthetics of the films themselves. Where Daft Punk and, to a lesser extent, Wendy Carlos linked their grainy synth music to the rocket-burst of an orchestra, Tron: Ares is stripped down and casually fun; it has the low-stakes loose feeling of a garage-band record, even as its high-shine attention to sonic detail suggests that garage typically houses a Bentley. A light electric buzz slides through “Infiltrator,” technically playing a countermelody, but doing it so faintly the effect is more like that of a crackling tube of neon vibrating to the clean thump of the bass that pumps the song forward. The slot-machine roll of arpeggiating notes in “This Changes Everything” sounds a bit like Pink Floyd’s “On the Run” if it were retooled into a mildly paranoid dance track. Every change in “New Directive” turns the song in a new direction, sending it down some fresh underlit tunnel—this one blue as open sky, this one blood red, all of them haunted by droning Dracula organs. “Give me something to believe in!” Reznor sings in “As Alive as You Need Me to Be,” sounding more like he’s calling for a great beat than searching for life’s meaning; should you be tempted to read too much into it, he chases the sentiment with a truly ridiculous vocoder refrain of “Yeah yeah yeah yeah.”
In these ways, Tron: Ares is the closest Reznor has come to the kind of late-career back-to-basics record every member of the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame eventually makes. You can imagine the rich thump of “Infiltrator” pumping up a late-’80s Wax Trax party. There are hints not only of Front 242’s minimalist first-wave EBM, but also the slick retro reworks of artists like Boy Harsher and TR/ST, who have drawn fresh blood from a dated sound. The flashing darkwave and techno of “Target Identified” could slip unnoticed into any goth night anywhere in the world.
But that’s also the problem: Since when has Nine Inch Nails gone unnoticed anywhere? The pleasure of the people playing this music is obvious and infectious, but it’s hard to shake the idea that despite their effectiveness, the hardest-charging songs here feel incomplete, that the film score’s mandate not to draw too much attention to itself hampers the songs’ ability to fully bloom on their own terms. Not since Lil Nas X flipped “34 Ghosts IV” into “Old Town Road” has a Nine Inch Nails song felt so in need of a remix.
Reznor and Ross’ best scores tend not to make the kind of bold statements they do so well with Nine Inch Nails, though. They operate more like a perfume whose scent is unmistakable in any kind of room. It’s a little standoffish, a little distant, with heartbreak heavily implied. It’s music that sounds like it’s made peace with desperation, in other words, and they do it superbly here. “100% Expendable” is built from a bank of lightly detuned synths that tremble faintly the longer their chords are held. The tone—harsh, brassy, like trumpets with bayonets—feels like a direct callback to Wendy Carlos’ A Clockwork Orange score, the latter’s menace replaced by the damp resignation of Radiohead’s “Exit Music (For a Film).” They pick the theme up again in “Building Better Worlds,” sculpting a cyber-hymn that crumbles into pixels as it’s being built. This is an album where something as minor as the live-wire buzz that runs behind “Daemonize” is trusted with carrying great emotional weight and succeeds.
It's precisely this kind of care that elevates “Who Wants to Live Forever?”, the best of the album’s four vocal songs and among the most affecting and approachable Reznor has ever written. On its face, it’s a straightforward piece of Oscar bait that the rubber-pants-era Reznor wouldn’t have been caught dead performing. The tender, quivering duet he shares with Spanish singer Judeline is wrapped around a melody that pushes his voice to a height it can’t quite hit. “I don’t want to be here anymore,” he sings, and the piano blooms and sighs behind him, its tone shifting between light and dark with every chord change. In the foreground, pink pops of sound dot across the track, their slow drift like digital cherry blossoms falling on a vintage ad-board. Is it hammy? Yeah, it’s a little hammy; you might think of “Defying Gravity” when you hear it. But it’s an incredibly effective piece of musical theater, too, and it’s made more complex when the same melody goes sour in the ruins of “Building Better Worlds,” the very next song. Not even the misty-eyed beauty of yearning lasts.
Tron: Ares, the Nine Inch Nails album, is being released nearly a month before Tron: Ares, the blockbuster film, so we don’t know yet precisely what kind of story Reznor and Ross are trying to tell through this music. This is probably for the best: It’s difficult to think of the possibility of “Who Wants to Live Forever?” being sung from the perspective of an AI longing to return to its digital planet and not have it ruin the song a little bit. Then again, it seems churlish to expect Trent Reznor to still be hacking away at the cutting edge of darkness four decades into his career. Over time, affect becomes aesthetics, pain becomes another color in the palette. Maybe. Maybe something can come from the heart without breaking it. Maybe you don’t have to hurt yourself to see if you still feel.
