Nine Inch Nails & Boys Noize : Nine Inch Noize
Immediately following the Coachella 2026 first-weekend performance by Nine Inch Nails and Boys Noize, extending from their recent soundtrack work and joint tour, an interesting thread strayed from the universal praise for the set that blanketed social and traditional media. It suggested that Trent Reznor was not just NIN’s founder and central figure but a monolith, Prince-like in his independence, where partners—up to and including his wife Mariqueen—were unnecessary and even detrimental to his art. “I don’t like this sound.” “He’s better when he works by himself.”
That view undermines Reznor and his fellow creators, and ignores NIN’s history from the jump, seeing as he was sucked into the Wax Trax!-adjacent projects Pigface and 1000 Homo DJs within months of his Pretty Hate Machine debut. Long or multiple engagements would follow with the likes of Coil, Josh Homme, Saul Williams, Mark Romanek, Rob Sheridan, Jimmy Iovine, Apple, HBO, Disney, a flock of Davids (Bowie, Lynch, Fincher, Grohl) and current official bandmate Atticus Ross, not to mention an endless procession of remixers. The man is a habitual collaborator, and it’s with this in mind that we must examine Nine Inch Noize, the new NIN album that brings on Boys Noize himself, Alex Ridha, as a primary performer.
In both content and order, the tracklist matches that of the “Nine Inch Noize” set played at Coachella’s Sahara tent on April 11 and 18, 2026: songs based on Peel It Back tour B-stage performances by NIN band members and Ridha, as well as music that had been played by the full band on the main concert stage (and some that hadn’t) now electronically reconfigured by Ridha, Ross, and Reznor. They worked out these new takes in show venues, studios, and catch-as-catch-can spots like planes and hotels. It was “a lot of fun” in Reznor’s words, but let’s remember that NIN’s version of fun often resembles some of the darkest kinks you can imagine. And considering his delivery of lines like “If there is a hell/I’ll see you there” in these modern times, Reznor remains comfortable conflating personal, religious, and political rebellion.
The whole quiet/loud thing has been done to death since Nirvana first heard a Pixies track, and as inhabitants of the alt-rock era themselves Nine Inch Nails relied on it then as well as now. But part of what makes NIN’s catalog—and Nine Inch Noize specifically—so relatable is a combination of broadly mutinous lyrics against socially fragile contexts, vocal arrangements that seem pretty easy for Reznor to deliver, earworm riffs and melodies everywhere, and the looming curiosity/threat of sonic chaos. So “Me, I’m Not,” “Heresy,” and “She’s Gone Away” get reconfigured here in the manner of NIN’s great Natural Born Killers track “Burn,” [relatively] slow grinds with a double-time punch-up in the outro if not the chorus. The catharsis is palpable.
Frankly, Boys Noize’s presence remolds the NIN sound significantly beyond this. Nine Inch Noize finds on-ramps to past and current trends in synth-based industrial—it’s as close as Reznor and Ross have been to pure electronic body music (EBM) in some time, where the throb and crunch of “Vessel” suggests all vestiges of real instruments bitcrushed or corrupted beyond recognition. NIN also get to flirt with other dance genres as they once did with drum ’n’ bass in the days of “The Perfect Drug.” By wrangling house-derived 4/4 energy and the drops and glitches of EDM, Ridha helps produce a version of How to Destroy Angels’ “Parasite” that absolutely gallops, plus a pairing of “Came Back Haunted” and Soft Cell’s “Memorabilia” (a B-side chestnut to drop diehards’ jaws) that would get the “Heartbreaker”/”Livin’ Lovin’ Maid” treatment in a just radio world.
As there will always be a disconnect between the YouTube-driven buzz over the Coachella debut of Daft Punk’s pyramid in 2006 and its later audio capture on Alive 2007, the visual elements of the Nine Inch Noize shows in California will make this companion album insufficient on some level. Combining the live reveal of these tracks with the drama of the asymmetrical stage, the immersive lighting, a fucking zombie dance troupe? Yeah, of course you had to be there. Still, the sound of Nine Inch Noize helps comprise a transformative event for all parties. It puts a bold stamp of mainstream approval on Boys Noize, a two-year process that has lifted him up from the fringes of the blog-house and French touch movements, and it screams to the world that Nine Inch Nails’ creative energy—almost 40 years on—appears boundless and renewable.
Label: The Null Corporation/Interscope
Year: 2026
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