Coachella, a festival on a vast polo field ringed by mountains and palm trees in Southern California, has established itself as a place where seemingly impossible performances happen, in many cases never to be repeated. As of last weekend, the latest act to join the lofty ranks of Daft Punk and Beyoncé is Nine Inch Nails—or, more specifically, Nine Inch Noize, an alternate version of the group made up of NIN mainstays Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, plus Mariqueen Maandig and Alex Ridha, the German producer known as Boys Noize. That band name appeared for the first time on the lineup for this year’s Coachella Festival, and news of this surprise album dropped last week, announced in plain text on billboards over the freeways in the desert en route to Indio, California.
It should be said that, even by Coachella’s standards of audiovisual production, another round of the show Nine Inch Nails have been doing for the last year on the Peel It Back tour would have been more than fine. Peel It Back brought the arena concert experience to its peak thanks to its hallucinatory visuals, novel use of multiple stages, and, most importantly, the way it made 30-year-old material sound fresh. Reznor called it “the best incarnation of Nine Inch Nails that’s ever existed.” Many longtime fans, including this one, agreed.
A New Energy for Industrial Classics
It’s not clear exactly when and where the recordings on this album come from. “We recorded this album all over the place,” Reznor said. “Some of it’s live, some in studios, hotels, planes, etc.” Anyone hoping for lovingly perfected versions of those heard on the Peel It Back tour may be disappointed. Live or not, this album has crowd noise, and something less than the cut-glass perfection of a studio album. Unfussy, dancey, and fun, Nine Inch Noize has a steady, thumping energy that makes it more of a romp than any of their classics, whose winding complexity, shifts in intensity, and overall vulnerability make them best suited to solo bedroom listening.
After some crowd noise and groaning synths, we plunge into “Vessel,” the best track from 2007’s Year Zero. Suddenly it feels like we’re in a tightly sealed studio, or, more abstractly, the immaterial space that so much of Nine Inch Nails’ music occupies. But then the crowd noise comes back. Suffice to say that, for better or worse, Nine Inch Noize is not so much a live album as a live-inspired album.
The Boys Noize Influence
You could trace this little curio’s origins back to 2024, when Reznor and Ross composed the score for the film Challengers. The pair commissioned a mixed (and remixed) version of their music from Ridha, who hadn’t enjoyed much clout since the blog house era. Ridha’s thumping mixtape version of the Challengers OST was a clearly superior product to the standard score album—a format that rarely works as a coherent listening experience. Despite Reznor and Ross’ imaginative score, Challengers failed to get the Oscar nod. It did, however, have the more interesting result of making Ridha a rare new addition to the Nine Inch Nails family.
The idea of Nine Inch Nails as a band has always been something of a conceit. In early interviews, Reznor said outright he simply preferred doing everything himself to “wasting time” working with others who didn’t share his vision. He established a relatively consistent lineup for his touring band through the ’90s and ’00s, some of whom also helped out on his albums, and who he always treated in interviews not as hired guns but as proper members of Nine Inch Nails. The lineup changed incrementally over the years. Then, in 2016, after teaming up on a few film scores, Ross became the first official second member of Nine Inch Nails. And then, in 2024, came Boys Noize.
Reimagining the Setlist
Ridha’s impact is harder to miss. Simply put, he brings the rave. On the Peel It Back tour, he DJ’d as the opening act. In an inspired sleight of hand, his set would finish on a crescendo that segued straight into a curtain drop, revealing Reznor alone on a small stage in the middle of the crowd, stunning an audience suddenly meters away from a man they worshipped. This second stage was home to drastic reimaginings of Nine Inch Nails’ music, served two ways. First, you got Unplugged-in-New-York style ballads, with just the piano and Reznor singing gently, even on typically heavy songs. Then, after a barrage of full-blown rock-band backed rippers on the big stage, the action moved back to the second stage, this time for what could loosely be described as a series of synth pop or club versions of the band’s songs.
No way around it, the best songs here are the only big classics. Along with “Closer,” there is “Heresy,” which, in a statement that may itself be an act of heresy, I would say materially improves on the original. On The Downward Spiral, it blazes in with menacing synths and a fascist march of a groove. Here, it opens with an eerily brittle drum loop, pairing elegantly with Maandig’s voice. This sets the stage for an explosive chorus: “God is dead, and no one cares,” screamed by Reznor with the guttural rage of a man a third of his age, backed by nothing but a fat and filthy synth tone, before the drums come back in.