New Nine Inch Nails

l to r: Trent Reznor, Alan Moulder, Atticus Ross

Hard to believe, but a new Nine Inch Nails album is just around the corner. Having been a NIN diehard since 1989, one becomes accustomed to waiting 5 years between releases. Always a frustrating process that does try the patience of a fan, but it looks like sometime in the first half of ‘07 – we’ll have new Nine Inch Nails material to devour.

Today on Trent Reznor’s blog on the official NIN fansite, Reznor posted the following:
“Today marks the official start of mixing the new record. The troops have convened, the planets have aligned and my insecure phase has passed – thanks for your concern.”

The latest issue of Kerrang! also features an interview with Reznor:

Your last album took six years. We’ve only had to wait 18 months for this one.

Trent Reznor (vocals): “It’s been pretty interesting, I’m probably as surprised as some fans are (laughs). But really it’s just a matter of discipline. When I was on the last tour, to keep myself busy I was just really hunkered down and was working on music the whole time, so this kept me in a creative mode and when I finished the tour I felt like I wasn’t tired and wanted to keep at it.”

Is there anyone else playing on the album?

“It’s all me, mostly recorded in hotel rooms around the world on laptops. There maybe some surprise vocalists that pop up here and there – although i don’t want to say who since the final mix hasn’t been determined yet, and Josh Freese is playing the drums on one song, but it’s not like a big guest star-type record. It feels a bit more focused in a certain direction than ‘With Teeth’ did,”

What’s the concept?

“I’m trying to avoid getting too detailed about this but I will tell you that this is a concept record, and it’s part of a bigger picture of a number of thing’s I’m working on. Essentially I wrote the soundtrack to a movie that doesn’t exist. This album is a bit more electronic and I’d say rhyme plays a bigger element in it than in the past and it’s veering away from concern about song structure and getting played on the radio.”

Are you talking about some kind of multimedia event?

“My goal is that the music can be interpreted with the richest context. So what I’m immersed in is a way to achieve that. Now that albums have gone from 12 inches of real estate with artwork and a whole aesthetic, to CDs, which are ugly and disposable, to nowadays just being a file on a computer, it’s led me to putting a lot of thought in to ways to present music that still makes it feel important and that has depth and purpose.”

Will it be a heavy album?

“It’s not heavy in any kind of Metal type sense, I’d say a big inspiration sonically would be early Public Enemy records, a collage of sound type of thing, not heavy in a Metal guitar kind of way.”

On ‘The Downward Spiral’ and ‘The Fragile’ you blended together an extreme amount of disparate sounds and layers – is this moving further in that direction?

“Well Alan Moulder (long-time collaborator) was stunned when he first heard it. Normally a Pro-Tools session has alot of tracks and this time he was like ‘You’re kidding me, it’s only this much stuff?’. The end result has a bit of racket to it, it’s much more improvisational, less refined. With this record i feel alot less concerned about what people think about it – especially the dying record industry. I couldn’t care less about that right now.”