Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor Dressing Up As Vampire Priest Will Blow You Away

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Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor dressed up as a vampire priest for Halloween. See the photo below.

Reznor discussed Year Zero in a recent Juxtapoz interview, “Year Zero was the biggest shift, in a number of ways, including how we wrote together. We were bored on tour, and decided to make an album embracing minimalism. In this case, we were on the bus, on a laptop. Today, that’s not a big deal, but at the time, laptops had just become a viable, pretty much uncompromised way of making music. Instead of being in a room with guitars and everything around, we had some kind of primitive plugins and the ability to chop up audio. So we said, “Let’s see what happens only using that.“

It wound up being wildly, musically exciting. We started talking, and were pretty worked up about what was happening politically for the first time in our lives, I think. The Bush administration seems quaint in comparison, but at the time, we felt like, ‘Man, this is madness. What would have happened if this kept on?’ That became the premise: telling a story in fiction, set as a series of snapshots, and how we could actually tell that story. I didn’t want the songs to be a narrative journey that hit you on the head as obvious.

If those were just little snapshots, how could we tell the story through the artwork and the supportive material around it? Yeah, we could have done a graphic novel or writen elaborate liner notes, because people still bought albums or CDs in those days. That’s when we started thinking we should do something different. We were blown away by what 42 Entertainment had done with other artists, this really inventive way of telling a story that utilized multimedia and current technology. It became a partial scavenger hunt. It spilled between fiction and reality in a way that we found really compelling.”