Nine Inch Nails Return With the Lead Single From the Forthcoming TRON ARES Soundtrack

Nine Inch Nails Gets Their Game On With the Lead Single From the Forthcoming TRON ARES Soundtrack

Trent Reznor plans to kill two birds with one stone: score another Disney movie and release a NIN album at the same time…meh.

Trent Reznor scrapped the serious industrial rust and grime off his band’s sound after The Downward Spiral (1994) and pretty much never looked back. The next few albums The Fragile (1999) and With Teeth (2005) featured clean, albeit distorted, electric guitar, squeak, and squeal driven by live drums. The live drumming managed to remind the listener that this was music made by humans with beating hearts and syncopated natural rhythms. As time progressed though, and Reznor teamed up with Atticus Ross for a plethora of soundtracks, live instrumentation started to fall by the wayside. 2013’s Hesitation Marks was a mostly full on electronic affair loaded with ambience and moan. The organic sounds that tied NIN’s sound to the ever present humanity that struggled to be heard through all the noise dissipated. Now, with Reznor and Ross’ latest soundtrack, which plans to pull double duty as a NIN album, Reznor strives to merge the film score with the album, delivering something for his movie score fans and long suffering NIN fans. The only problem is that the lead single, while serviceable as a movie trailer background track and a single, is nothing innovative in either sense.

At this point, we really don’t know if the rest of the tracks on the album TRON ARES will be complete songs or snippets of background movie soundtrack…uh…tracks. “As Alive As You Need Me To Be” is definitely a fully realized song. Reznor’s aggressive, and nasal as ever vocals are just as powerful as they were 30 years ago on The Downward Spiral. The years have definitely been kind to his voice. That’s about where the new song’s accolades end though. While the song has plenty of electronic manipulations and layers to fill up the space between your headphones, the lyrics, beats, and electro-washed guitars (which are too few and far between) are almost rote. The “yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah…yeah!” bridge is almost cringeworthy. The chorus, in which Reznor repeats “Give me something to believe in/As alive as you need me to be” is also nothing to get excited about. We’ve heard Reznor groan through this type of existential crisis many times before, in a much more engaging way. Yes, this is a Disney soundtrack so he won’t be singing about “fucking (anyone) like an animal,” but labeling such toned down and boring music a NIN project is just disappointing.

Maybe live drums are too much for the House of The Mouse. Even Soundgarden had to tone it down for The Avengers soundtrack years ago. NIN’s last great song was “Less Than” from the Add Violence EP back in 2017 and even then the chorus break sounded like a recycled snippet from “We’re In This Together.” from The Fragile. In the classic Pearl Jam Single VIdeo Theory short film documenting their recording of Yield, Stone Gossard waxed poetic on how long one can maintain their creative energy and keep coming up with great art. Does the well dry up eventually? It appears that it is beginning to for Reznor and Ross. Nine Inch Nails will always be a legendary recording unit that changed the face of loud, hard, electronic, and metal music by bringing it to the masses. I guess those innovative sounds and albums will remain the product of a once deep and seemingly never ending well, that has slowly dried up over the last decade and a half.