Nine Inch Nails are Planning a New Record

Last year, we reported that there may not be new Nine Inch Nails anytime soon, but I guess nearly a year is soon enough because now there appear to be some plans in the works.

A recent interview with Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross in GQ confirms that there will be a new record soon, and it likely will be different than their recent soundtrack work.

“I do feel excited about starting on the next record,” Ross says in the interview. “I think we’re in a place now where we kind of have an idea.” 

Reznor adds that recently he “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.”

He elaborates:

“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.”

He adds that while they are getting away from the movie soundtrack vibes, they’ve learned things on that journey that will carry through to their future work:

“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 there’s no timeline yet, but we’re thinking by next year, we may luck out and get a new record.