Coachella, a festival on a vast polo field ringed by mountains and palm trees in Southern California, has established itself as a place where seemingly impossible performances happen, in many cases never to be repeated. As of last weekend, the latest act to join the lofty ranks of Daft Punk and Beyoncé is Nine Inch Nails—or, more specifically, Nine Inch Noize, an alternate version of the group made up of NIN mainstays Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, plus Mariqueen Maandig (Reznor’s wife and collaborator in the group How to Destroy Angels) and Alex Ridha, the German producer known as Boys Noize. That band name appeared for the first time on the lineup for this year’s Coachella Festival, and news of this surprise album dropped last week, announced in plain text on billboards over the freeways in the desert en route to Indio, California (“ИIИE IИCH ИOIZE ALBUM OUT 4.17.2026”).
It should be said that, even by Coachella’s standards of audiovisual production, another round of the show Nine Inch Nails have been doing for the last year on the Peel It Back tour would have been more than fine. Peel It Back brought the arena concert experience to its peak thanks to its hallucinatory visuals, novel use of multiple stages, and, most importantly, the way it made 30-year-old material sound fresh. Reznor called it “the best incarnation of Nine Inch Nails that’s ever existed.” Many longtime fans, including this one, agreed.
It’s not clear exactly when and where the recordings on this album come from. “We recorded this album all over the place,” Reznor said. “Some of it’s live, some in studios, hotels, planes, etc.” Anyone hoping for lovingly perfected versions of those heard on the Peel It Back tour may be disappointed. Live or not, this album has crowd noise, and something less than the cut-glass perfection of a studio album. Unfussy, dancey, and fun, Nine Inch Noize has a steady, thumping energy that makes it more of a romp than any of their classics, whose winding complexity, shifts in intensity, and overall vulnerability make them best suited to solo bedroom listening. “We had a lot of fun revisiting these songs and hope you enjoy,” Reznor said. “Fun” is a conspicuous choice of wording coming from a singer who will remind crowds that they are here to have a “bad time.” It’s a joke, but inside every joke is a little truth.
After some crowd noise and groaning synths, we plunge into “Vessel,” the best track from 2007’s Year Zero. Suddenly it feels like we’re in a tightly sealed studio, or, more abstractly, the immaterial space that so much of Nine Inch Nails’ music occupies. But then the crowd noise comes back. So yeah, like the man said, studios, hotels, all over the place. Suffice to say that, for better or worse, Nine Inch Noize is not so much a live album as a live-inspired album.
You could trace this little curio’s origins back to 2024, when Reznor and Ross composed the score for the film Challengers. The pair commissioned a mixed (and remixed) version of their music from Ridha, who hadn’t enjoyed much clout since the blog house era, and was, by his own account, surprised to get the call. Ridha’s thumping mixtape version of the Challengers OST was a clearly superior product to the standard score album—a format that rarely works as a coherent listening experience, and that Reznor has been trying to improve on since Oliver Stone hired him to curate and edit the Natural Born Killers soundtrack. (Remember when soundtracks felt like mixtapes with dialog from the movie woven in? That was mostly Trent’s idea.) Despite Reznor and Ross’ imaginative score, Challengers failed to get the Oscar or Golden Globe nods of their other film projects. It did, however, have the more interesting result of making Ridha a rare new addition to the Nine Inch Nails family.
The idea of Nine Inch Nails as a band has always been something of a conceit. In early interviews, Reznor said outright he simply preferred doing everything himself to “wasting time” working with others who didn’t share his vision (an approach he shared with Prince, one of his key influences). He established a relatively consistent lineup for his touring band through the ’90s and ’00s, some of whom also helped out on his albums, and who he always treated in interviews not as hired guns but as proper members of Nine Inch Nails. The lineup changed incrementally over the years. Then, in 2016, after teaming up on a few film scores, Ross became the first official second member of Nine Inch Nails. And then, in 2024, came Boys Noize.
Stylistically, Boys Noize has left the clearest mark of anyone who has shuffled in and out of NIN’s roster. Ross’ impact is mostly under the hood. In an interview with Rick Rubin, Reznor explained that, for instance, Ross would finish and send off something they’d been working on while Reznor took time off with his family—a change in creative process that, while hard to audibly discern, is fairly radical for a longtime one-man band whose single member brought himself to the brink sweating every last detail of every project.
Ridha’s impact is harder to miss. Simply put, he brings the rave. On the Peel It Back tour, he DJ’d as the opening act. In an inspired sleight of hand, his set would finish on a crescendo that segued straight into a curtain drop, revealing Reznor alone on a small stage in the middle of the crowd, stunning an audience suddenly meters away from a man they worshipped, who they assumed would appear on the distant mainstage after the 20-something-minute break that usually follows the opener.
This second stage was home to drastic reimaginings of Nine Inch Nails’ music, served two ways. First, you got Unplugged-in-New-York style ballads, with just the piano and Reznor singing gently, even on typically heavy songs (like, in the case of the Berlin show, “Ruiner”). Then, after a barrage of full-blown rock-band backed rippers on the big stage (”March of the Pigs,” “Wish,” “Head Like a Hole,” “The Perfect Drug,” etc.), the action moved back to the second stage, this time for what could loosely be described as a series of synth pop or club versions of the band’s songs. No drums, no guitars, just racks of synths and drum machines, manned by Reznor, Ross, and Ridha.
Who’s to say what happened behind the scenes, but it was hard not to imagine Ridha was the driving force for this part of the show. The songs had the thick smack of Boys Noize records, which themselves often bear the ultra-linear funk of “Closer,” Reznor’s most influential song. That’s the kind of number you imagine Reznor, a sworn enemy of nostalgia, would grow tired of playing year after year for audiences that would feel cheated without hearing it. It speaks to the magic of that second stage, and Nine Inch Noize, that “Closer” feels truly fresh here. It begins not with the tell-tale kick… snare…, but with the haunting 16th-note arpeggio that usually comes in the post-chorus, like the sound of mechanized ants swarming over one another. Hearing that familiar passage, in isolation, at the beginning instead of the middle, might briefly throw even the most devout fans, so that when that iconic thump does come in, it’s surprising enough to be a “fuck yes” moment—an impressive feat, given everyone knew it was coming, sooner or later.
No way around it, the best songs here are the only big classics. Along with “Closer,” there is “Heresy,” which, in a statement that may itself be an act of heresy, I would say materially improves on the original. On The Downward Spiral, it blazes in with menacing synths and a fascist march of a groove. Here, it opens with an eerily brittle drum loop, pairing elegantly with Maandig’s voice. This sets the stage for an explosive chorus: “God is dead, and no one cares,” screamed by Reznor with the guttural rage of a man a third of his age, backed by nothing but a fat and filthy synth tone, before the drums come back in.
While these two may be the overall highlights, every song on the album slaps, forming a work distinctly superior to their original records (setting aside, of course, The Downward Spiral). “Vessel,” with its sassy staccato funk, evokes Prince and Talking Heads in a way I never noticed before. “As Alive As You Want Me To Be,” the single from Reznor and Ross’s recent Tron score, was disappointingly unsubtle and simplistic as the first proper new Nine Inch Nails song in five years. Here, it wraps things up with fittingly explosive energy. Then you’ve got the cover of “Memorabilia,” the first and least successful single from the ’80s synth-pop group Soft Cell. Beyond sounding creepily seductive and perfectly in place, it’s simply an inspired curveball for a tight set list that leaves out most fan favorites.
The quasi-live aspect of Nine Inch Noize doesn’t totally land. It's nice to have such pristine recordings of these songs, mostly unaffected by arena acoustics. But the way the cheers of the crowd fade in and out at contrived moments, rather than running low in the mix throughout the whole record, has the unfortunate effect of making it feel a little canned, almost like a laugh track. Still, the decision to make this a live album, to link it inextricably to a time and place—the second stage on the Peel It Back tour, the Sahara Tent at Coachella—feels right. It would be a shame, if cool in a way, to have these alternate versions exist only in the memories of fans who were lucky to be there. Then again, that wouldn’t really happen, as they’re all on YouTube (and a bootleg digital “mixtape”) anyway. You imagine such considerations are not lost on Reznor. Brilliant new versions of generational classics were never going to stay in the vault. We were going to hear these tracks one way or another. Might as well be Trent’s way.
