It has been more than four years since Nine Inch Nails released their last album, 2020’s Ghost VI: Locusts. But lest you thought that NIN mastermind Trent Reznor and longtime musical foil Atticus Ross have spent those years just chilling out, the pair revealed in a new interview with GQ that, in fact, they have an avalanche of new projects in the pipeline.
Many of the various and sundry things on tap will funnel through the new multimedia company the duo started, With Teeth, which the magazine said is built around storytelling in a number of disciplines, including fashion, an upcoming music festival and a deal with Epic Games for “something that is not exactly a video game, in the UEFN ecosystem Epic has built around Fortnite.”
Most excitingly for NIN fans, though, is the news that all that scoring work has gotten the pair excited about a new studio album. Reznor said that scoring “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.”
Now, however, Ross said he feels, “excited about starting on the next record… I think we’re in a place now where we kind of have an idea.”
With Teeth, which Reznor and Ross pieced together over the past two years with their longtime art director John Crawford and producer Jonathan Pavesi, is meant to help the men find new ways to explore NIN IP. According to GQ, the idea was, “what could they do that they hadn’t already done around storytelling? Some of that might take the form of examining Nine Inch Nails from yet another angle — ‘we’ve been working on homegrown IP around Nine Inch Nails, stories we could tell, and we’re working on developing those in a way that are not what you think they’d be,’” which the mag noted would not be a biopic.
In addition, the two are developing a TV series with The Bear creator Christopher Storer, as well as a film with veteran horror director Mike Flanagan (Doctor Sleep).
The piece describes the surprisingly predictable hours the longtime best friends and business partners keep, with each showing up to 58-year-old father of five Reznor’s backyard L.A. studio Monday through Friday to work on their various ventures from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. without fail. “We show up. We’re not late. We’re not coming in to start to f–k around,” Reznor said of Oscar-winning duo’s discipline.
Among the other projects on tap are the completion of the score for Luca Guadagnino’s upcoming film Queer, as well as one for the director’s sports love triangle drama Challengers (out April 26), which stars Zendaya. Of the latter, Reznor said Guadagnino’s marching orders included a suggestion along the lines of “what if it was very loud techno music through the whole film?” The duo are also finishing the score for the upcoming Scott Derrickson sci-fi thriller The Gorge starring Anya Taylor-Joy and Miles Teller.
But wait, there’s more!
Reznor also said they are working on a short film with the artist Susanne Deeken, a clothing line due to launch this summer called Memory Fade and the unnamed music festival, which the singer said NIN plan to “debut as performing as composers along with a roster of other interesting people”; a new record label is slated to launch around the same time as the festival.
Check out the GQ cover below.
