Nine Inch Noize
Nine Inch Noize
INTERSCOPE
Ever since Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ soundtrack to 2024’s salacious sporty drama Challengers, and continuing on through the score for last year’s Tron: Ares, Nine Inch Nails and German tech-house/EDM producer Alexander “Boys Noize” Ridha have been like skin on bologna with each other—whether on tour or in remix form. A full-on, deep-body, skull-fucking, metal-electro collab of thumping, throbbing, post-mashup songcraft, then, was inevitable. What isn’t inevitable, however, is that the trio would look backward to NIN’s canon for the occasion—including the mega-influential Soft Cell, whose naggingly repetitive “Memorabilia” Trent & Co. used as a B-side for “Closer to God”—for their new morph-tronic sound design project.
Is that bad? No. The rave-rage purity of hot electronic music (that which Boys Noize holds dear) is akin to the healing waters of Fatima for Reznor and Ross. The steamy digital liquidity and pulsating fluidity newly splashed onto “Heresy” and the 1990s’ most dread-inducing industrial anthem, “Closer,” (both from The Downward Spiral) washes them clean and removes these deeply meaningful tracks from their past (sort of). The same thing—albeit with a metallic, lime-encrusted edge—happens to “Parasite,” originally from Reznor and Ross’ How to Destroy Angels project, as well as “Me, I’m Not” from 2007’s Year Zero. Recording in studios, on live stages, and between flights gives the bolt-upright sound of “Memorabilia” necessary tension and would do the late David Ball—Soft Cell’s genius industrial avatar musician-composing half—proud.
That said, for all their shared self-love, electronic dreams, and hanging out, why didn’t Reznor, Ross, and Ridha just do something wholly original? Surely the three of them could have talked some filmmaker into using that as a fresh score. Nine Inch Noize wasn’t a wasted opportunity, but it also doesn’t seem to have been the best use of time for three guys who clearly have a knack for ready invention and innovation.
