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.
A big indicator that this isn’t just any remix LP from Reznor, Ross, and now Boys Noize is that this collab album has a new branded name, Nine Inch Noize, and is represented as a mainline canonical release on nin.com, and not just a compilation or remix album (even though it is). It also is an album that was born out of their 2025-2026 Peel It Back Tour, which introduced Boys Noize to the NIN ethos as an opening act and later as a joint operation for some select songs in their set. Whether this was decided before the tour, or it coalesced organically is up for debate, but the latter might prove to be the better route, because it allows the reinterpretations to grow on their own terms.
Boys Noize
Another exciting feature of this album is their embrace of synth-laden electronic music, which was incorporated impressively into their Tron: Ares soundtrack, the first score by Reznor and Ross that was actually branded under their industrial rock name and is yet another neat detour, but one that still left fans wanting more. One doesn't have to look far to see how intertwined electronic music has always been for Reznor. Ever since their debut album Pretty Hate Machine, synths and programmed drums were all over those classic songs, turning what was once an 80s aged nostalgia sound into hard-hitting industrial rock anthems, such as Terrible Lie and Head Like A Hole. So electronic programming and synthesizers have always been a part of the NIN DNA, even when Reznor would go off into extremely gritty and dark brooding industrial rock-metal territory.
Not only do fans get this collab album, there will always be the legendary Coachella performance this year, an exclusive Nine Inch Noize set, complete with extremely vivid and immersive lights and dramatic sets and dancers, er, crawlers, rather. It seems like the Peel It Back Tour and this Coachella performance were designed to prime fans for this new album’s sound and style. Several songs were sung by not only Reznor, but also his wife Mariqueen Maandig, from their side project How To Destroy Angels, to the enthusiastic surprise of fans of both groups as she joined Trent on stage. By the way, HTDA, when are you getting back together?!
Trent and company had a surprise guest, his wife, Mariqueen Maandig, from their side project How To Destroy Angels, who joined them onstage
The Album
The first thing to be noticed about Nine Inch Noize that jumps out immediately is the presence of the audience in the audio. It makes you think that this is just going to be a live tour companion album, but it quickly cuts the audience cheers and changes it up to what I imagine sounds curiously like a soundboard performance. Whether it’s the soundboard, which gives the songs that pristine studio quality, or if they’re studio recordings that cleverly incorporate the excitement of the audience, does it really matter? This cut in and out of a live tour atmosphere to studio mix to live again makes this a special hybrid of an album, as it aims to give everyone a taste of Peel It Back.
The album works as a seamless EDM set, which is another great leap forward for NIN. Here is the awesome synthesized vibe of Tron: Ares, showing how capable Reznor and Ross are at this game, if it wasn’t already evident or if fans haven’t been paying attention to their film work or before that long and storied discography full of companion remix albums that reimagine their best albums. As a result, there isn’t really a wrong turn that they can take in Nine Inch Noize.
Starting off with an Intro track that introduces listeners with the revelation that this had been cooking throughout Peel It Back, the short formless track wastes no time and feels like the opening moments with the lights going dim for a truly epic industrial electronic performance. The first song, Vessel, is a personal favorite of mine, and gives me fond memories of my own NIN remix EP that I made at the time when Trent released his Year Zero multitracks for fans to reimagine those songs and submit them on the since-decommissioned but dearly missed remix.nin.com. It gives a great new perspective to a very popular Year Zero song.
She’s Gone Away, a Trilogy track from Not The Actual Events, which was famously memorialized in David Lynch’s otherworldly masterpiece of television, Twin Peaks: The Return, picks up where Vessel leaves off almost immediately and without pause. It’s another song that has a brand new context when taken out of its original resting place. For EDM and NIN remix fans, this another banger and fan favorite, complete with newly recorded vocals as it is for all of these reinterpretations and with stabbing pulsing synths and darkstep drums. Amazingly, Trent’s never sounded better.
One of the main draws of Nine Inch Noize of course will be their Downward Spiral tracks, Heresy and Closer, both given this industrial electro treatment. If I had to pick my favorite Nine Inch Noize version tracks from the album, I’d have to give it to all of the Year Zero songs, Vessel, Me, I’m Not, which is one of the coolest beats of the album, and The Warning, which retains that amazing bit-crushed electronic beat and sexy baseline. The Hesitation Marks songs Copy of A and Came Back Haunted are also notable, probably due to album that they spawned from. Like Year Zero, Hesitation Marks songs have this sheer, electronic-informed production style to them, while some of the other songs, from albums like The Downward Spiral and Not The Actual Events are more industrial and instrument-focused. This might be what makes them seem to work and click in my brain more than the others. Memorabilia, a Downward Spiral B-Side, caught me by total surprise, since I felt that the repetitiousness in the original song sort of fit the vibe of other electronic music I was listening to when I was a teenager, and I remember adding it to an electronic mix I made that I burned to a blank 💿 for a friend.
Despite a very colorful selection of songs throughout their career though, I can’t help but feel the longing for some representation of the massive double album behemoth The Fragile. This is arguably most diehard fans’ favorite album. Other peculiar omissions are any songs from the With Teeth era, the follow up to The Fragile. Both of these albums are so big in their production styles that the possibilities seem endless for every single song from either album, front to back. With Teeth’s opening song All The Love In The World, for example, is a pure disco-laden and piano-led track where Trent’s vulnerable vocals stand out more than almost all of his work as Nine Inch Nails. This song would have made for a tender electronic reimagining that would have been a showstopper for Nine Inch Noize, guaranteed! All of this I feel belongs, and that is before I even get to Pretty Hate Machine songs Terrible Lie or Head Like A Hole, from the debut album that started it all 37 years ago. I guess, since some fan favorite interpretations that were a part of the tour, such as Sin, didn’t make it in, that there’s hope of a deluxe or expanded edition in the future.
Final Thoughts
To recap, I opened this review by saying how there doesn’t seem to be a better or more relevant time to be a Nine Inch Nails fan, and the lead up to it and the massive firehose of recorded material and their live presence in just over 6 months and just shy of a year respectively will go down in history as a NIN renaissance. Fans were left wanting more after Tron: Ares and boy did Reznor, Ross, and Noize deliver! Add to that the universal consensus that NIN stole the show at Coachella, and it’s not even close, and the surprise announcement Trent made this week that they are working on brand new original NIN music since Peel It Back ended.
At just under 61 years of age, Trent, the mastermind behind NIN, sounds better than ever and showed up every other artist at one of the biggest music events of the year, running circles around all the younger artists. The only other reported masterclass of a performance I heard was David Byrne’s of The Talking Heads, who is another legendary artist who is in his upper 70s, and gave all the younger generations a much-needed lesson in old school cool.
Part of the reason NIN is so good is because NIN music has always sounded new no matter how long ago these albums were released, and Nine Inch Noize and plenty of past remix albums prove how easily this music can be brought back into the fold and made new again in the present day. My only criticisms of this latest album is that there isn’t more, which is actually a compliment. There should have been some Pretty Hate Machine, The Fragile, and With Teeth representation on here, which would have propelled my review to a 9 or even higher decimal easily. When I said this is the first fully-formed album since Hesitation Marks, I misspoke, because this will soon, hopefully given this crazy output, be unseated by a brand new original NIN album. Before that happens though, fans have more than enough reason to play both Nine Inch Noize and the Tron: Ares soundtrack fucking loud.
Nine Inch Noize: 8/10
Recommended Tracks: All 3 Year Zero tracks, Vessel, Me, I’m Not, and The Warning