In the streaming economy, the marquee release never dies—it just gets remixed. It's understandable if TRON Ares: Divergence appears as yet another attempt to keep the discourse churning and the streams piling up. But Trent Reznor has been putting out remixes of Nine Inch Nails LPs and singles for decades just to satisfy his curiosity. Ever since he Fixed Broken in 1992, Reznor has used these releases as a way of exploring ideas that don’t necessarily fit the album at hand. He enlisted Coil and J.G. Thirlwell to help him transform Broken’s industrial metal into Fixed’s glitchy IDM, and he apparently inspired Rick Rubin to seek higher forms of nirvana judging by the way Rubin turned the steamy slink of “Piggy” into the breakcore of “Piggy (Nothing Can Stop Me Now).” One and a half songs on Further Down the Spiral are Aphex Twin rarities that bear no reference to The Downward Spiral. Despite working primarily as a solo artist or, since 2016, with sole bandmate Atticus Ross, Reznor has always presented Nine Inch Nails as a concept open for anyone to interpret and improve upon.
TRON Ares: Divergence is the first Nine Inch Nails remix album since 2007’s Y34RZ3R0R3M1X3D, but Reznor and Ross sound more energized and present here than they have in years. Gone are the overbearing logos and Disney branding that made the cover of last year’s TRON: Ares look more like a playlist than a proper album. The art—while still not up to the standard of a typical Nine Inch Nails release—gives no indication that this music is in any way related to a blockbuster film. Nor does the music itself. Working with bandmate Ross, as well as a strong cast of remixers including tour collaborator Boys Noize, Reznor retools the film score into a stylish and confident, if occasionally tedious, album of aggressive dance music that stands on its own. As a result, TRON Ares: Divergence represents something new in Nine Inch Nails’ lengthy discography: It’s the first remix album that improves on its source so much it threatens to obviate the original. Why listen to TRON: Ares when you have this?
Freed from the aesthetic obligations of a film score, Reznor and Ross can do whatever they want. And as anyone who’s caught the ongoing Peel It Back tour can tell you, what they want is to turn every arena in your country into an inky black and red rave. They bring you there in “Godmode,” a high-powered dance song built on a taunting, two-stepping arpeggio of synth with an ugly streak of noise guitar smeared across its pristine surface. “Operand”’s candy-popping synth tones are the closest thing to new wave he’s done since Slam Bamboo. It’s oddly heartwarming to hear him doing this stuff, clearly having a great time as he slowly bends the circuit and the tone shifts and feels more sour. It’s a nice reminder that the difference between the band that smashed their keyboards at Woodstock ’94 and A Flock of Seagulls has always been little more than a few synth patches.
The guest remixers seem to have gotten the brief; with the exception of Chilly Gonzales’ characteristically spare and beautiful piano-playing on his version of “100% Expendable,” every sound feels tuned for the dance floor. Meat Beat Manifesto’s Jack Dangers reworks “Infiltrator” into a heavy and hyperkinetic Wendy Carlos dub, while the excellent Working Men’s Club remix of “I Know You Can Feel It” is claustrophobic and unnerving despite its minimal instrumentation. Neither sounds like anything Nine Inch Nails has produced before, but both seem more imbued with the band’s spirit than the songs they’re remixing. The Dare twists every knob on the board in his version of “Shadow Over Me,” turning it into either the meanest song LCD Soundsystem ever recorded or the most playful one Nine Inch Nails ever recorded.
TRON: Ares’ “Alive As You Need Me to Be” was their most effective pop song since 2005’s “The Hand That Feeds,” and “Who Wants to Live Forever” is the closest thing to an adult-contemporary song Reznor has ever written. Here, both are completely dismantled and scuffed to the point of being barely recognizable. PC Music’s Danny L. Harle, fresh off of working with PinkPantheress and Caroline Polachek, proves an inspired choice for “Who Wants to Live Forever.” He rebuilds the torch song as shadowy hyperpop without snipping the thread of Judeline’s crystal-floss vocals, steering things in the direction of Alice Deejay’s “Better Off Alone” before correcting course. Chicago EBM trio Pixel Grip put a little air in “Alive As You Need Me to Be,” letting it float beyond the hard charge of the Grammy-winning original.
But the album’s best and most interesting track belongs to Arca, who puts her own spin on “Alive As You Need Me to Be.” Working in cyber-hymn mode, she places soft sounds around Reznor’s vocal like a series of potted plants and allows them to bloom. His voice is processed, a little choppy, like he’s fighting through a rough cell phone connection, which has the effect of foregrounding the glissandos that unfurl around him like ferns slowly taking over a room. “It’s eating up the space between us,” Reznor sings. “It’s eating up all remaining doubt.” The vocoded “yeah yeah yeah”s that made the original feel like a bit of a lark are processed to sound like a muted trumpet. It’s an exceptional bit of arranging on Arca’s part, highlighting both the heavenly way love draws people together and the sad realization that it can come at the cost of one’s individuality.
It’s unexpectedly affecting to hear Arca recast TRON: Ares’ big single and one of the Peel It Back Tour’s high-energy centerpieces into something like a masc Vespertine. Coming as it does at the tail end of a 78-minute-long Wax Trax revival, her version of “Alive As You Need Me to Be” suggests an alternate history of Nine Inch Nails, one more open to a tenderness of touch and femininity than Reznor, for all his curiosity, has allowed himself to explore with this project. Ultimately, TRON Ares: Divergence does what its title suggests and peels away from its parent narrative. It finds, hidden within the big-time sensuality that Ross and Reznor so clearly enjoy pursuing, that there are still more answers to the question Trent Reznor has been asking for decades: What have I become?
