Nine Inch Noize Review
If there ever was a time to be a Nine Inch Nails fan, now would be the time! Given how many years it’s been since a complete fully realized NIN LP, 2013’s Hesitation Marks, fans have plenty to be excited about. Yes, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross have been at it with their Trilogy EP releases Not The Actual Events (2016), Add Violence (2017), and its final LP Bad Witch (2018), their ambient nightmare-scapes Ghosts V: Together and Ghosts VI: Locusts (both 2020, same release), the seemingly endless film scores they’ve composed, and most recently their NIN-branded Tron: Ares soundtrack.
The reason I say it’s their first fully realized NIN project since 2013 is because all these previous releases, while all amazing in their own ways, have been projects that have felt adjacent to what a proper NIN release should look and sound like in the late 2010s and 2020s. These projects are worth their weight in gold, but they all feel like creative detours and not a true NIN experience from beginning, middle, and end. The closest we can get to this full realization though, is a collab album with Boys Noize, which as it turns out is a reimagining, or remix album, of past big Nine Inch Nails songs. If you’ve been a fan, you already know that a remix album is actually legit for NIN, and this one frames the brooding industrial rock gods through an electronic, hybrid-EDM lens, and puts classic Nine Inch Nails songs to the test.