It usually takes over half a decade for a new NIN album to surface. Not this time. May 2005 saw the release of With Teeth, the long-awaited follow-up to 1999’s The Fragile, the latter the sound of helplessness and despair of drug addiction committed to tape. Now, both clean and sober, Reznor is on a roll. Having woken up from a deep dependency, he has found that the creative juices are still flowing, and in under two years, With Teeth’s successor is here.
Two years ago when Hammer spoke to the newly drug-free Trent, he was in good health, but his manner still painted a picture of an anxious sociophobe. Conversation came uneasily with little eye-contact. Today the classically-trained musician is the relaxed and sunny antithesis of his former self. Explaining when and how he started this new album, Trent admits that it had a lot to do with boredom. That while “it’s fun to play the show,’ the rest of the day is just waiting around. So he started working with the “limitation” that all he had was a laptop, and so, “some cool stuff started happening.”
After the With Teeth tour, he decided against taking a break. He started expanding the ideas he’d created using only his laptop, and the lyrical concept was born. Trent had just moved to Los Angeles – an incongruous choice for the renowned antisocial – from where he’d previously moved to isolate himself, New Orleans.
“I didn’t go to LA for the culture,” he says smiling a wry smile. “I moved there to be around my peers. The fake tits and celebrity bullshit is all there, but it’s not all that’s there. You don’t see me out, or see pictures of me shopping – I’m repulsed by it to be quite frank – but I needed to be around people who do what I do, to make the whole Year Zero thing happen.”
With everything going so swimmingly, Trent moved from his new home to a remote and “creepy” house in the Californian hills to write and build lyrics out of his concept. Disappearing into the woodwork for a while, the isolation allowed him to escape the usual urban distractions, and Trent centered himself. After three months on the far side of nowhere, all that remained was the odd nip and tuck, and Year Zero was road-ready. The new record was not to be simply another album of gloomy introspection, but the first of two albums: a big picture political narrative about a dystopian very near future in which a selfish people abuse their world and have to suffer the consequences, and an elusive force called, The Presence.
“Oh hey, we can talk about that”, Trent says before addressing the label person charged with keeping his schedule running on time. “Give me five more minutes, OK?” Reaching the end of our allotted interview time, we mention something that he’s keen to talk about, and he extends our interview. Shocked that the socially anxious recluse would want to spend more time being probed, we sit down again. He explains that the main purpose of the record was to call attention to the totalitarian political climate and how we are destroying ourselves and our planet.
“It was an epiphany of sorts,” he says. “And it revolves around sobriety. When you’re an addict you feel like your problems are the biggest problems in the world. I’m not saying I can change the world, but now I feel like it’s my duty as a human to do try and do something.” Trent has admitted that when he quit drugs he was worried that he wouldn’t be able to write again, but that With Teeth proved he could. Does his lyrical choice of a fictional concept suggest he no longer has personal demons to confront? “I was writing fiction for the first time,” he says before quickly reassuring us that: “it’s clearly fiction. I couldn’t write another Downward Spiral because that would be lying.” So is ‘the concept’ a substitute for personal exorcism? Or are you really just tapping into emotions that are fast fading into the rear-view mirror?
“This is a good question because…” He stops for a few seconds and averts his eyes. “Let me just think about this for a sec.” Again he pauses. The silence is uncomfortable. “I’ll just keep my mouth shut.” About what? “I know you’re baiting me,” he says, smiling warmly. “When the day comes that I have to hire the flavour of the day to write my records for me so I can sound like what my records used to sound like so I can make money… just stick a fork in me. Honestly. I don’t mean to sound like I’m on a high horse here but when it gets to that state, that’s absolutely not what I’m about. From principle. I’ll walk the highway before I start doing that shit.”
Trent becomes animated as he asserts that whether or not you like Nine Inch Nails, loved or hated this or that record, he made them all for the right reasons. “Because it means more to me than anything else in my life. I can sleep well at night – when I can sleep – knowing that I have always kept that pure.” From: https://www.loudersound.com/features/nine-inch-nails-year-zero-interview-2007
