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On the new NIN album:
Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross, and Co’s new soundtrack is a marvel. Decades into the project, Nine Inch Nails’ middle-aged phase has threatened to devolve into a vaguely-Muzak distillation of the brand (as so many bands end up after they’ve come this far), but this soundtrack puts to rest any doubts about NIN’s continued relevance. The Tron: Ares soundtrack is a remarkable work of art. Trent's NIN has indisputably evolved past its feral, volatile youth as a dance-industrial rage machine, and settled its nerves considerably, though the thirst for technological innovation and artistic expression through a dirty, "industrial", sometimes angry lens, remains, and shines as bright (or as dark!) as ever.
What surprises me most about the Tron: Ares soundtrack is how existential it feels — even before the film’s release.
The movie might be a mess; it might not. I’ve never been invested in the Tron franchise. I’ll watch it for the aesthetics and the technical flair. I admire the craftsmanship of big popular films, but with blockbuster fare like this, the matter of where it ultimately settles into the grand narrative of art history usually comes later — long after the spectacle has run its course.
Unusually, for this film, the soundtrack and the band that composed it are the most prominent marketing components in the Hollywood product — hyped above the stars and starlets and the CGI action and the plot of the film. Some promotional materials are minimal: nothing but the NIN logo below the film title.
That should cause any culture critic to take notice. There’s something unique going on here, such a direct promotion between soundtrack and screen.
So let’s talk about it…
As music conceived for film, the soundscape naturally suggests cinema, its dramatic shifts and shadowy textures evoking the stark aesthetics of the silent era. Trent & Atticus & Co’s album channels German Expressionist films — imagine a Fritz Lang fever dream, jagged and meticulously composed.
Consider the track Permanence: less than 90 seconds long, it might initially pass as a wallflower — the kind of mood-invoking filler track you could find on any soundtrack. Yet it’s sturdy: clearly composed, full of tiny shocks, quick jolts that let the listener feel the music’s careful designed-ness, as are all the tracks here. Here, instruments that resemble strings play slow, sentimental lines, but their timbres are subtly off — metallic, hollow, blatantly synthetic — creating a sense of uncanny displacement. It’s the kind of distorted, emotionally heightened effect German Expressionist cinema conveys, a shadowed cityscape in sound. It’s also undeniably brittle, which, combined with the track name, suggests the piece comes at a particularly fragile moment for a character in the film.
(It’s a fun exercise, trying to extrapolate plot points before seeing the movie, based on the soundtrack alone.)
Tracks like In the Image Of and 100% Expendable deliberately use retro synth textures that resurrect Brian Eno and Bowie's Berlin Trilogy work — itself indebted to the German Expressionists. This is not an incidental resemblance: Trent has long acknowledged his debt to that lineage, and it shows throughout.
That German influence? Oddly enough, it threads through the entire album — not in national origin, but in artistic spirit. Trent, an American, and Atticus, a Brit, follow in the footsteps of Bowie, Eno, and Iggy. They were American and British outsiders who drew from German art, and they transformed the era’s cold, robotic synths into a humanist vision that resonated across the world, and showed us a tragic, divided 1970s Berlin. This would seem to reflect in the Tron universe’s divide between the technological and material worlds. And this, by extension, speaks to the polarized world we inhabit today.
In my first three listens, the album seemed to move backwards through that country’s art history, most of the stages easy to recognize: from contemporary techno (pounding dance beats and industrial clatter; no one needs this unpacked), to the aforementioned Berlin Trilogy of the 1970s (clear enough in the synth textures and structural choices), to 1920s Expressionist cinema (a more abstract link, but still graspable in its shadow-play)… and finally, it arrived at 19th-century German Romanticism: Wagner. Yes, Big Richard’s fingerprints are here. And it’s here I feel I should explain myself further.
It's perhaps unusual to think about Wagner while listening to NIN, but some passages bring him to mind, and not in the way you might think! It's not bombast or noise that draws a connection here. Both Wagner and NIN have struggled to escape constricting stereotypes about bombast; they are (or were, in Wagner’s case) equally adept at delicate pieces, their output of which is woefully underappreciated by the masses. But the true connection between Wagner and NIN here is that they both explore existential questions through austere motifs. And they both go deep.
With Wagner in mind, I'm thinking specifically of Parsifal, his late, solemn opera. Its meditative motifs about life and redemption, laid out symbolically though a story that mixes Buddhist and Christian themes, move upward in pitch, and create a reverential, almost sacred sound. Here, Trent, Atticus, and the NIN band concoct a sacred and reverential soundscape as well — but they move it downward. The descending pattern recurs across several tracks. You can hear it most clearly in As Alive As You Need Me to Be: two notes descending, chromatically, gently, and then two more — this time a thrilling, gut-wrenching plunge, like a roller coaster gone over the crest — under the chorus line “give me something to believe in; all these hands have got a hold on me.”
Wagner’s motifs in Parsifal rise steadily and consistently, carrying their Christian and Buddhist philosophical weight toward transcendence. NIN’s motifs in Tron: Ares feel just as deliberate — but they fall, and that carries its own contemporary message about transcendence in the modern age.
Both approaches are austere and measured, and both are fundamentally existential. Wagner ascends toward the light of life, spiritual striving, and transcendence; Trent, Atticus & Co. descend into shadow, fragility, and human uncertainty. The downward motion in Tron: Ares — combined with the lyrics and the story’s preoccupations (to the extent they can be extrapolated through what’s been revealed so far) — makes the existential questions immediate and tangible: mortality, vulnerability, and the search for meaning in a world in flux. For that, it feels surprisingly and paradoxically uplifting: its deep empathy and recognition of society's current predicament hits like a brisk, cold shower: darkness artfully rendered, channeled into catharsis.
(And like Wagner ingeniously did with his music, there’s deeply emotional storytelling embedded within the music itself: just as you don’t actually need to understand the German lyrics when watching a Wagner opera because the music guides you… While listening to Tron: Ares, I felt like I could make out the emotional contours of the plot from the music alone, long before the actual film has been released to the masses.)
The highlight of the album isn’t the flashy As Alive As You Need Me To Be, an epic banger on par with NIN’s classics, which here functions as a kind of potpourri overture — in operas, that’s what we call it when the show opens with a mash-up medley of all the motifs to come. The true showstopper — and my early pick for the Best Song Oscar — is the requiemic, ceremonial Who Wants To Live Forever, a delicate ballad duet with lyrics that lay bare the album’s themes of death, longing, and a search for meaning:
Please, hold onto me
All of us are here to die
Stay here inside me
All we ever had, was time
(That track is also unmistakeably indebted to Radiohead: it was clearly influenced by the title track on that other landmark art-rock album about technology and modern alienation, Kid A.)
It’s striking how a blockbuster soundtrack, aimed at a mass audience, can feel this serious. Trent has long chased innovation, but here he pairs it with something rare: a soundtrack that speaks for itself within the confines of the Hollywood blockbuster machine while urging us to reckon with what it means to be human. It makes Tron: Ares unexpectedly compelling — it’s existential in ways I didn’t anticipate, even before the film has come out. And it’s a reminder that NIN’s dark, industrial lens can still reach profoundly human places.