Nine Inch Nails’ and Boys Noize’s ‘Nine Inch Noize’: Album Review
Trent Reznor is still one jukebox musical away from EGOT status, but it’s safe to assume that the prime slot he got in Coachella’s dance-focused Sahara Tent feels better to him than any award. In some ways, the booking was the special recognition he’s striven for his whole career, an accomplishment NIN and the producer Boys Noize are celebrating with the Nine Inch Noize album. It’s essentially an EDM album, and an excellent one.
At its core, the industrial genre — at least the foot-stomping, synth-spangled Skinny Puppy, Nitzer Ebb, Ministry, and Front 242 records that Reznor adored in the mid Eighties — was indisputably dance music, and Reznor initially wanted Nine Inch Nails to be played in clubs. Like his inspirations, he launched Nails with 12-inch singles overflowing with remixes he had adorned with blippy synths and four-on-the-floor thumps, with the hopes of filling smoky dance floors at midwestern goth nights. But even though he ultimately found his groove touring with a live band on the late-Eighties alternative-rock circuit, Nine Inch Nails’ collaboration with German-Iraqi EDM producer Boys Noize, is a special validation and a full-circle moment.
For years, Reznor has remixed his own songs and invited dance music luminaries to perform cosmetic surgery on others. Over the years, Fennesz, LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy, Aphex Twin, J.G. Thirlwell, Coil, the Faint, Deadmau5, and members of New Order have all put their own outré spins and downward spirals on Nine Inch Nails’ music. But there’s something special about the way Reznor and his Nine Inch Nails bandmate Atticus Ross clicked with Boys Noize, a.k.a. Alex Ridha, in recent years. They have a spark that elevates the songs they remixed together in a new way.
Ridha, 43, came of age at the right time to appreciate both NIN and Nineties rave culture. His ability to mix house, acid house, and hip-hop beats made his 2007 debut, Oi Oi Oi, an underground EDM hit, setting the stage for future success with 2009’s Power and 2012’s Out of the Black. He became an in-demand remixer and collaborator, working with Skrillex (on their Dog Blood group), Lady Gaga (he co-wrote “Rain on Me”), and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, among several others.
In 2024, Reznor and Ross asked Ridha to remix their Challengers score, which he did without even seeing the movie. It was well received as Challengers [Mixed]. That led to collaborations with Nine Inch Nails on their Tron: Ares soundtrack and an opening slot on Nine Inch Nails’ Peel It Back tour. During the trek, in the middle of NIN’s set, they would arrange all their synthesizers into a U shape and invite Ridha to join them for what became known as Nine Inch Noize, live remixes and improvisations of short sets of songs like “Closer,” “Sin,” and “Only,” among others.
These collaborations were so inspiring that the trio recorded the Nine Inch Noize album “all over the place,” as Reznor said when announcing the record. “Some of it’s live, some in studios, hotels, planes, etc.” The appeal, he said, was making music that was “purely electronic.” But even though there are no live drums or meat-grinding guitar riffs, the voices of Reznor and his How to Destroy Angels bandmate (and wife) Mariqueen Maandig, make it feel human. Even better, the group remixes the music in a way that makes Nine Inch Noize feel alive.
The album features new versions of songs by Nine Inch Nails, but unlike the albums of re-recorded back catalogue that artists like U2 and Sting have put out in recent years, the group didn’t pick obvious songs to revisit for Nine Inch Noize (other than “Closer”). Instead, they chose ones that could benefit from head-imploding electronic bass drums and a little TB-303 squelch. Whoever would have thought that The Downward Spiral‘s “Heresy” and its Nietzschean “God is dead” chorus would still sound good after a squeaky acid-house makeover?
Largely, though, the album fits the party vibe of the Sahara tent (without sacrificing NIN’s menace), and the track list mirrors the collaboration’s Coachella set lists. It even opens with an “Intro” and crowd noise. The songs mostly come from mid-career Nine Inch Nails (three from 2007’s Year Zero, a couple from 2013’s electro-focused Hesitation Marks, and rare deep cut from How to Destroy Angels’ 2010 self-titled EP) and they perfectly capture the right mood. And, as a reminder that it’s Nine Inch Nails, the lyrics in this batch of songs never stray far from Reznor’s lyrical themes of wanting, ceding, and acknowledging control. “I let you put it in my mouth,” goes the first lyric on “Vessel,” but the key words there are “let you”; Reznor is in control, and he knows what he’s doing.
The synthesizer riff on “Vessel” sounds more robust than on the Year Zero version, and there’s more echo all around; the song ends with a beat that recalls both Schoolly D and Pretty Hate Machine while remaining unique. Another Year Zero cut, “Me I’m Not” has a heavier bowmp bowmp riff than the original’s, here, recalling Yello’s “Oh Yeah” (but with no chicka-chicka, so it’s not corny) and a sparser chorus that allows for an acid-house solo. And for “The Warning,” which doesn’t have the original version’s guitar, the noise boize summon more bass and throbbing sounds.
They edited Not the Actual Events’ “She’s Gone Away” to about half the length of original, and brevity, here, is the soul of it. This version feels weirdly more human and more effective than the original. The higher vocal harmony also warms up the chorus, a feat for a purely electronic arrangement, especially as it ramps up to a sawing synth breakdown. The Angels’ “Parasite” has both electronic cowbell and a riff that recalls Knight Rider without the triumphalism, paving the way for the rave staple of a warning alarm sound at the end. Of the two Hesitation Marks songs, “Came Back Haunted” feels more original here than “Copy of a,” thanks to its synth mangling deep-house outro, though maybe “Copy of a” was already made for the club.
Some songs feel remarkably different. When it came to “Closer,” they funked it like an animal with a syncopated rhythm instead of the original’s push-pull drums, and new vocal samples, like the high-pitched “no” that comes distantly after Reznor singing, “You can have my isolation,” reveal new textures. The previously buried final verse of the song (“I drink the honey inside your hive/You are the reason, I stay alive”) is now front-and-center, and so is some new bouncy-house bass drumbeats. And their cover of Soft Cell’s “Memorabilia,” previously only a deep cut on NIN’s Closer to God single, throbs and squelches, ending with a big house beat. The way Reznor whisper-sings the vocals and adds his own “I have been inside you” lyric, could make Marc Almond almost sound like a sweetie pie (which is a feat since Almond sang “Sex Dwarf”).
The album’s closing track, “As Alive as You Need Me to Be,” is a fitting summary of Nine Inch Noize, since the Nails and Boys Noize produced the song together for Tron: Ares, but weirdly it doesn’t feel like a climax since it’s expected. The only thing that might have made the album even better would have been if the group challenged themselves to radically rework some of Nine Inch Nails’ harder-rocking hits like, “Wish,” “Last,” or “We’re in This Together” into techno bangers. Knowing Reznor’s obsession with experimentalizing from the many remixes, demos, and alternate versions of his own songs that he’s released over the years, they likely attempted remixes of those songs but couldn’t dance to them.
Watching the choreographed golems that paraded and danced around Reznor, Maandig, Ross, and Ridha at Coachella, you could see the level of attention-to-detail Nine Inch Nails has always put into their quality control. And you can feel that measure-twice-slice-once ethos when listening to Nine Inch Noize, though they afforded themselves enough wiggle room to breathe life into the songs.
The album sounds like the culmination of a lifelong ambition for Reznor, one of many obsessions he’s chased for nearly four decades. “I have finally found my place in everything,” Reznor sings on “Vessel.” “I have finally found my home.” He sounds like he means it here, too — at least, until he pursues his next dream.
