Nine Inch Nails is beginning to plot a brand new record. According to core members Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross in an interview with GQ, a new Nine Inch Nails record should be a nice change of pace from the duo’s recent string of movie soundtracks.
“I do feel excited about starting on the next record,” Ross said. “I think we’re in a place now where we kind of have an idea.” Reznor added that putting the band down for a little while “managed to make Nine Inch Nails feel way more exciting than it had been in the past few years. I’d kind of let it atrophy a bit in my mind for a variety of reasons.”
The next Nine Inch Nails record will be their first since Bad Witch in 2018, or their first since the double ambient project of Ghosts V: Together and Ghosts VI: Locusts in 2020, depending on how you wanna look at it.
Reznor elaborated a little on his and Ross‘ process and the drive to be creative outside soundtrack work after GQ editor Zach Baron noted he’d “asked a somewhat rude question about their soundtrack work, which was: Why would Reznor or Ross work for anyone else when they didn’t have to?”
“I thought about that over the weekend,” Reznor said. “It’s like, Why are we doing this? The idea comes from what we think is a good place of ‘Let’s break it up. Let’s get sent down the rabbit hole on certain things and feel like we’ve got tasks being assigned to us rather than us just blindly seeing what happens creatively.'”
“I think coming out of a stretch of a number of films in a row, I want some time of seeing where the wind blows versus: There’s a looming date on a calendar coming up and we better get our shit together. And certainly in the last few weeks I’ve been itching to do what we often do, which is just come in and let’s start something that we’re not even sure what it’s for.”
Reznor later added: “Let’s try some stuff. We’re bored. We are. You know what I mean? We’re grateful. We enjoy doing films. We can write a better Nine Inch Nails record, I think. We can put on a cooler tour. We are aimed to do that. But man, what if we try to do that?
“What if we could take what we’re good at, like we did with film? We identified something I think we’re good at and we figured out how to apply it to something else. What if we take that theory and try it on some other things? And that’s led us into: We’re not beaten down completely yet. And it feels exciting. That’s what matters to us right now.”
So here’s hoping a new Nine Inch Nails record surfaces maybe sometime in 2025?
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