Nine Inch Nails has done really well for themselves over the past two years. The duo is scoring Watchmen and Pixar's new movie Soul, and is currently up for nomination for the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame this year. In 2018, Nine Inch Nails was sampled on the massive Lil Nas X hit "Old Town Road" in 2018, scored both Mid90s and Bird Box, and released three albums (or EPs).
While 2019 isn't the year you'll get a follow-up to that string of Nine Inch Nails studio albums, vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Trent Reznor tells Rolling Stone a new record is certainly being planned.
Right now, we are finishing up Watchmen, and we’re working on the Pixar film that we are doing. And we have plans for Nine Inch Nails stuff, but we haven’t got down to doing it because literally every minute of the day for the last several months has working on score stuff. But the plan is to do stuff, yes.
He also talks a little bit about working with Pixar and how he feels that it's a great growth opportunity for him.
I read something about someone like Robert De Niro years ago — maybe it wasn’t him and maybe he didn’t say it — but someone ask, “What’s your take on this movie you’re making?” He goes, “I haven’t even seen the end result. I’m not doing it for that. I’m doing it for the process of doing it.” And I thought that was kind of odd. Then what I found in my own life is that by taking on these scoring projects, for us, it’s not, “How’d it do at the box office?” or “What was the Rotten Tomatoes score?” It’s nice if it does well. But being in the trenches, collaborating with someone new, learning from them, fighting with them, figuring out their process — that’s the exciting stuff, especially when it’s someone you resonate with. That’s true with Damon Lindelof.
So someone said, “Are you interested in working on an animated film with Pixar?” Yeah, I don’t think anybody does animation better than they do. And we end up meeting with [Pixar’s chief creative officer] Pete Docter, and he’s what you hope he would be. It feels very authentic, it feels very exciting and it’s very, very different from anything else we’ve ever done, from the way they do it to how they think about it. And we’re a risky choice for them, so that makes it very appealing. Can we do something like that? That means us working out of our comfort zone. It’s early days but it’s been really cool.
