Nine Inch Nails

The musical project of Trent Reznor (born May 17, 1965), Nine Inch Nails was born in 1988, the year the band signed with TVT Records. A year later, Pretty Hate Machine, the first album to achieve cult status, was released, certified platinum and produced by Mark Ellias aka Flood and Adrian Sherwood. NIN's success made them one of the spearheads of the industrial metal movement, which they established as one of the major trends of the 1990s. The band took part in the Lollapalooza festival before embarking on a stormy first European tour. Following the radical Broken EP (1991), which reached number seven on the Billboard charts, and the founding of the Nothing Records label, Trent Reznor set about producing his second album, The Downward Spiral (1994), again with Flood. It reached number two on the Billboard charts, and gave rise to the sequel Further Down the Spiral (1995), a collaborative project involving the band Coil and Dave Navarro, J.G. Thirwell, Rick Rubin and Aphex Twin. In 1999, NIN returned with The Fragile, featuring artists as diverse as Dr. Dre, Clint Mansell and producers Bob Ezrin and Steve Albini. The band reached the top of the US sales charts and emerged from tour with the live album And All That Could Have Been (2002). Weakened by problems of alcohol and drug addiction, Trent Reznor took some time off before successively offering With Teeth (2006), marking a return to the predominant electronic sounds of the first album, and Year Zero (2007), following the live album Live: With Teeth. In 2008, the four parts of the Ghosts I-VI project are distributed exclusively via the Internet, with videos produced by fans. The official album The Slip followed a few months later, before the band went on hiatus while Trent Reznor worked with Atticus Ross to compose the music for the film The Social Network (2009). Both received a Golden Globe Award and an Oscar for this work. The collaboration continues on The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011, Grammy Award) and Gone Girl (2014). Nine Inch Nails made a comeback in 2013 with the album Hesitation Marks, featuring guitarists Adrian Belew and Lindsey Buckingham (Fleetwood Mac), followed by a tryptic comprising the two EPs Not the Actual Events (2016), Add Violence (2017) and the mini-album Bad Witch (2018), released under The Null Corporation imprint. Atticus Ross has since become a permanent member of Nine Inch Nails. The band continues its evolution with the release of Tron: Ares (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) in 2025, their first studio album since Ghosts V: Together and Ghosts VI: Locusts (2020). This project marks a collaboration with Disney, bringing an industrial touch to the film's score. The single "As Alive As You Need Me to Be" is released in July 2025, followed by the full album in September.