Album review: Nine Inch Nails – TRON: Ares (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross have been living double lives for a good while now. Ever since the duo composed the score for David Fincher’s The Social Network in 2010, they quickly became two of the most in-demand musicians in Hollywood and TV – accompanying everything from Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s PBS documentary Vietnam to the more improbable likes of Disney-Pixar’s Soul. Parallel to this, of course, has been Nine Inch Nails’ storied musical legacy continuing to live (T)rent-free in the minds of younger musicians.

Recent years have seen their influence become so pervasive we’ve had 5 Seconds Of Summer pay homage and Miley Cyrus covering Head Like A Hole. Halsey even recruited Trent and Atticus to produce the excellent If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power.

What’s so exciting right now, however, is that these dual lives are finally converging as TRON: Ares pulls the double shift of all double-shifts. Here we have a soundtrack to a blockbuster movie and the first new Nine Inch Nails album in five years all rolled into one. No pressure.

Lead single As Alive As You Need Me To Be – one of four songs to feature Trent’s singing – served as a brilliant declaration of intent. A world apart from where NIN left off with 2020’s Ghosts VI: Locusts instrumental record and, say, the gorgeous orchestration of 2024’s Queer soundtrack, it is a digital firestorm of a song. Equally impressive is just how easily its lyrics dialling into TRON: Ares’ plot strands concerning artificial life fit into the wider NIN canon of alienation.

Astounding moments like this pile up. Target Identified’s stalking instrumental is a masterclass in tension-mounting dread, while A Question Of Trust will be the perfect soundtrack for your next trip to the local fetish club. Even when you think they might be about to make a misstep when Infiltrator starts a bit too upbeat, some low-end pulsing synth throbs re-set the song’s coordinates squarely back to terror town.

Film soundtrack that this is, there are some caveats to note. Saddled with the duty of telling a visual story musically, this is not a normal NIN album, and not just because there are recurring motifs. As a band, they have always leapt between aggression and tranquility in their music, but rarely this consistently. You are equally likely to get issued a digital drubbing as you are to be immersed into some of their most dissonant and ambient soundscapes. Echoes and No Going Back plunge listeners back into the eerie world that makes NIN’s instrumental album series Ghosts so mesmerising. I Know You Can Feel It, meanwhile, builds from relative quietude into a hypnotising digital whirlpool of noise, skittering drums and eerie atmospheric textures.

Among the 25 tracks contained, there are many candidates for its finest moment. No words are spoken in songs like Forked Reality, In The Image Of and Building Better Worlds, but the levels of drama and feeling they conjure, even when divorced from the context of the film, is breathtaking. Ultimately, though, TRON: Ares reaches its peak with the one-two punch of Still Remains segueing into Who Wants To Live Forever? The former, a piano led gem that could rub shoulders with NIN classics like The Frail and Lights In The Sky, the latter a gorgeous track pairing Trent with Judeline. It starts out as a Trent Reznor lullaby before the Spanish singer appears for a haunting duet. ‘All we ever had was time,’ she sings, gracefully. If you weren’t already contemplating your own mortality before you pressed ‘play’, you sure as shit will be by the time it ends.

That Nine Inch Nails have executed a stunning return is a given, but the size and scope of this particular victory – this double victory, actually – should not be overlooked. Soundtracks are tasked with amplifying and heightening the emotional and visual impact of the films they accompany, but you couldn’t blame TRON: Ares director Joachim Rønning if he issued a throat-straining gulp when Trent and Atticus turned this in. Somehow his film now has to live up to its soundtrack.

Verdict: 5/5

For fans of: Perturbator, HEALTH, Crosses

TRON: Ares (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) is out now via Null Corporation/Disney