Trent Reznor discussed listening to mid 90’s Nine Inch Nails music for the first time in awhile, and how it inspired him when writing new material in a recent interview with Zane Lowe. Alternative Nation transcribed his comments.
“We just felt like we wanted to make this record, and the inspiration musically kind of came, oddly enough from, we were working on a project of Nine Inch Nails for something else. We allowed ourselves to become self-referential, and look back at some of the things we’ve done, and write a song like something else, which has never been the starting point. It has always been how do we never look at what’s happened, I’m not saying every song is unrecognizable from the last. But it was listening back to some stuff, mid 90’s, that sounded pretty exciting having not listened to it in awhile, ‘Let’s make something that is referencing that.’
It wound up being really fun and exciting, and felt like wow, we’ve been restricting, there’s a lot of creative avenues we didn’t allow ourselves to even think about. It felt like, maybe we’ve kind of done something kind of like that in our own heads. Having fun for a day in the studio felt very liberating, and also made me realize some of the stuff I was learning, these experiments I went on, was reactive to things that weren’t necessarily that true. It was an interesting cerebral experiment to see, can I emulate this trend that is happening? It’s not me, I’m not emotionally connected to it.”
Nine Inch Nails are planning to release two major projects in 2017, following the release of Not The Actual Events in December 2016.
