Nine Inch Noize Lets the Songs Come Back Haunted: Review

Nine Inch Noize, the new collaborative project between Nine Inch Nails and Boys Noize, is billed as the “culmination” of the trio’s work together, from Boys Noize reworking the original score for Challengers, to the thumping synthwave found in TRON: Ares, to them joining forces live during the band’s “Peel It Back Tour.” It is the logical endpoint of their collaboration, sure, but it also represents something Trent Reznor has been circling for decades: a version of himself that never left the rave.

Reznor’s music has always mined the murky space between grooves. Throughout Nine Inch Nails’ discography, Reznor has used the messy outpour of punk and hard rock as a foil to the rigidity of synthesizers and drum machines, to push these mechanisms to their breaking point. It leads to moments, like on “The Day The World Went Away” or “Head Like a Hole,” where the machine decays and his humanity — however tortured or sick — rises above. That rock-rooted release valve was always the escape hatch, the thing that kept Nine Inch Nails tethered to something human and physical. Nine Inch Noize removes it.

In recent years, Reznor has never scaled back on his fascination with what electronic music can do when it refuses to behave. Nine Inch Noize is the pinnacle of this approach, reimagining Nine Inch Nails songs — mostly from the last 20 years — as brutal beasts of the rave, with hardly any reprieve.

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The album begins in a strange fashion, though, with the roar of a crowd cheering on the band. From the outset, we’re in a live setting, but then the window to the outside world shuts as the throbbing groove behind “Vessel” comes into focus. The thread of live performance and the presence of an audience on these recordings is repeated throughout the album. It’s a fascinating choice, and not exactly the most intuitive one given how so much of NIN’s songs revolve around alienation and mental collapse. The way the crowd fades in and out of the mix makes it feel like you’re exiting the bright sunlight and entering a long, dark tunnel, where the only way out is through.

It helps that the songs on Nine Inch Noize are rendered with outsized dynamics, so much so that it’s difficult to tell which sonic elements were reprised from the original songs, which have been recreated and beefed up, and which sounds are entirely new. The album’s club architecture is where Boys Noize’s fingerprints show up, but when these songs start flying off the hinges — like the double time freakout at the conclusion of “She’s Gone Away,” which is both bouncy and blistering — the trio combines in a furious rush of splintered noise.

There are so many songs in the NIN catalogue that are ripe for reinterpretation or would absolutely kill in dance-forward contexts. But the decision to select almost entirely songs released from 2007’s Year Zero onward — with the exception of two Downward Spiral cuts, “Heresy” and “Closer” — implies that Reznor had some unfinished business with these tracks.

It makes sense to dig into more recent NIN fare, because those electronic-focused originals are rooted in minimalist synth work, build-and-burn structures, and mechanistic grooves. “Copy of A” was already a thematically rich composition, with commentary on the lack of identity and the repetitive nature of generational trauma. But instead of pushing the track further in that copy-of-a-copy direction, the trio break the song out of its rigidity completely; with updated vocals from Reznor, they give the song more immediacy and urgency, turning it into a caustic burst.

As for the older, arguably more beloved NIN songs, they similarly flirt with the edge in a captivating way. “Closer” has always been one of NIN’s pop masterpieces, and on the new album, it remains as such; the rework retains much of the bones of the original but becomes an almost supercharged version, with the central synth line coming to life and a meditative new bridge.

“Heresy,” meanwhile, boasts a clever new wave touch. With a refined synth-based sound, it’s another track that feels close enough to the original but aims to get even freakier. The rework makes an already punishing beat drop feel even more destabilizing. Just like the ominous rendition of Soft Cell’s “Memorabilia,” it functions as a kind of historical memory, tracing these songs back to the genre roots that first shaped them.

That lineage becomes explicit in the transition from “Heresy” into the How to Destroy Angels cover “Parasite,” where Reznor and Mariqueen Maandig find themselves in eerie unison — the royal court of rave, presiding over something genuinely unnerving. Maandig’s presence throughout Nine Inch Noize is essential: her voice adds an ethereal upper register above Reznor’s miserable low end, and together they make even the album’s dancier moments feel less like release and more like exorcism.

That tension — pleasure laced with dread — is what separates Nine Inch Noize from a straightforward remix project. “Came Back Haunted” cancels out the slow burn of the original entirely, rebuilt for brutality; this version sounds like he actually is haunted. “The Warning” contains plenty of sweetness in the thwack of a clap-snare and Reznor’s playful vocals, but the crushing double-time drop serves as a reminder that on Nine Inch Noize, no moment of lightness goes unpunished.

Just like the band’s mind-boggling Coachella set suggested, Nine Inch Noize finds Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross, and Boys Noize expanding the framework of the Nine Inch Nails experience, proving that these songs were always capable of becoming something more feral, more unhinged, and more alive. The result is one of the more genuinely surprising records in Reznor’s catalog, and proof that some of the best NIN songs were never finished — they were waiting to come back to life.