Nine Inch Noize and Reinventing Your Old Stuff
The talk of the town this past week has been the Coachella set which Nine Inch Noize put on. A hybrid project of Nine Inch Nails and Boys Noize, birthed from their tour together last year, the set was blistering. It set the internet alight. Perfect choreography, perfect lights, perfect sound. Trent Reznor's wife and accomplished musician all on her own, Mariqueen Maandig, joined as a statuesque, austere presence on co-vocals.
I am a snob about Nine Inch Nails. I admit it. Some of it is residual Gen X snobbery about a band that got too big, and I also admit that's a stupid thing to think. More concretely, they just weren't how I got into industrial and EBM. I got into the genre via Nitzer Ebb, Skinny Puppy, and old compilations of decidedly weirder, grittier stuff than old Trent's catalog. I have and had some strong fondness for both Pretty Hate Machine and the Broken EP. I like about half of The Downward Spiral. I have zero use for everything after.
Even as a youth, I found Reznor's lyrics formulaic: I got horny, I had sex, I hate the woman I had sex with, I think I hate myself even more than I hate her, we're both unclean. It was and is what Robin James calls a performance of wounded masculinity related to property rights read through personal libido. Reznor whines and spits his way through needless self-pity and ownership over the psyches and bodies of others (mostly women).
All of the politics of industrial are stripped away here, all of the nervousness about/longing for new technological regimes of power, everything condensed to the exchange between YOU and I. It took YOU to make ME realize, I'M the one without a soul/I'M the one with this big fucking hole, I want to fuck YOU like an animal/MY whole existence is flawed/YOU get ME closer to God.
But a couple of curious things happened over the past few years. One, Reznor entered his aging dad phase, mellowed out a bit, and seems like a pleasant guy instead of the whining forever adolescent he was for the entirety of the 90s. That shouldn't make me more amenable to revisiting the first two albums plus first EP, but it did. So I was already primed for the second thing that happened, which is this Coachella set. Working with Boys Noize, Reznor reinvented entire swathes of his catalog and even history, updating the sounds while making them heavier, harsher, more in line with contemporary German techno which, while getting a little long in the tooth and reaching diminishing returns, itself, is still really good when it's good.
The reworks are so good that the reworked versions even made the stuff I dislike-to-hate (most of NIN's albums) extremely up my alley. At least from the outside watching streams, this is the best stadium live performance of the year, maybe past few years, and I don't know that it's close.
The highlight is Heresy, off of The Downward Spiral. A song made of pure, distilled Reddit atheism, it hit pretty hard when I was 16 but quickly dwindled to a perpetual lowlight from that album for me. Sonically, the Coachella version is in thrall to heavier beats and a much more pronounced and persistent bass synth (I like bass synth a lot).
Lyrically, the formerly goofy decadence of Heresy hits a little differently in 2026. In the midst of a Christian nationalist takeover of the country, a little less immediate willingness to shrug our shoulders at depravity and weirdness is welcome, . The line "He made a virus that would kill off all the swine", obviously aimed at the AIDS epidemic of the 80s and 90s, feels more omnidirectional post-COVID. And Maandig's repeated "will you die for this?", more prominent here than in the original album version, takes on a terrible import during our warped holy war against Iran. It insists upon an answer: will you, will we, die for this?
But also: why is a 60 year old man the one to ask this? This is a question that he asked when he was in his 20s. It's a question that should be asked right now by people in their 20s. And the people in the crowd, some large percentage of whom were presumably in their 20s because the show was in a desert, ate it up.
This feels like an aside, but it's worth mentioning that Boys Noize is getting a boost from this, though he's not exactly obscure. I've always liked him, mostly via his remixes, and welcomed the way he toys with received notions of masculinity, particularly in his videos.
The Coachella set immediately put me in mind of another band. In 1998, Front 242 toured with entirely new reworks of their songs. As I recollect (and the recollection is better than the informed knowledge, in this case, because it feels truer to what we actually felt), nobody knew this was happening until people saw it live.
I loved and love Front 242. Like Nine Inch Nails, their sound was getting a little outdated. They'd been trying to work in newer house, electro, and trance elements from about 1991 on. But the 1998 tour, influenced by The Prodigy and immortalized on the album Re-Boot: Live '98, took things to a new level. Just like NIN at Coachella, they completely outdid themselves, upping the tempo, upping the bass synth, upping the power of the drums, creating new stage shows.
It was and still is the best show I've ever been to. Skinny Puppy's final tour got close for me, but I don't think Front 242 '98 will ever be surpassed. Part of it was just how good it was, how in your face and newly danceable, but part of it was the sheer surprise at how unexpected it was, even for a fan.
When the intro, 80% Happiness and 20% Modern Angel, came on, Tremont Music Hall in Charlotte erupted. Pure electricity and a needed, unexpected and unexpectedly delightful refresh. I sort of felt that watching Nine Inch Noize.
I want to come back to the figures of 60 year old Trent Reznor, 45 year old Mariqueen Maandig, and 43 year old Alex Ridha delivering music which feels only more vital and even transgressive in 2026. Why isn't it a 23 year old singing that stuff and getting that reaction?
That's partly an unfair question. I don't know every 23 year old. I try really hard to keep up with what young people are into; I even consider it part of my job description, but I know 23 year olds in bands are trying, though I'm not sure anyone is listening. And I also partly know the answer(s): nobody can afford rent so can't take a chance, we're stuck in a repeating cultural loop, radio consolidated then died, streaming kills revenue, and all the rest. But also... but also...
I reference my students a lot, but I had a discussion with some of them today about their paper. It's on their frustrations with pop/internet psychology as an identity marker, especially self-diagnosis, with a side of analysis of the death of subculture and the local as a vector for internet mental health as a replacement.
"You're frustrated by all this, aren't you? You're wondering where all the music and local culture went?"
They nodded emphatically.
"I don't know the answer, either. But I do know that, somehow and someway, people your age have to make it."
