Silent for almost five years, NIN’s Trent Reznor has clawed his way back to sobriety and sanity, and delivered a gnashing new album to boot.
Trent Reznor can’t stop fidgeting.The man behind Nine Inch Nails sits in an overstuffed chair inside a staid London hotel room, crossing and uncrossing his legs, tucking his feet underneath him, constantly shifting position. He drinks some coffee, takes off his sweater, then springs up to walk to an open laptop on a nearby desk. He glances at it, hits some buttons, closes the screen, and returns to the chair. Over the next hour, the ritual will repeat itself numerous times, with only slight variation.
“Sorry, I’m really jet-lagged,” Reznor apologizes. The singer flew in from the States last night to play two sold-out shows in London; the performances are serving as warm-up to a full-scale tour he’ll soon be embarking on to support Nine Inch Nail’s new release, With Teeth (Interscope). “I got two hours of sleep, but I’ve got some weird nervous energy.”
Reznor flashes a boyish grin, and it’s suddenly hard to imagine how he ever got saddled with titles like Rock’s Dark Prince. Unless, of course, you listen to his music. Reznor, as the mastermind behind Nine Inch Nails, has created a volatile mixture of industrial, heavy metal, synth pop, and punk rock, dropping album after album of the most abrasive music this side of Hell’s own orchestra. With Teeth certainly burns with the band’s trademark angst, but this time, the anger and aggression actually hide a sordid, frightening truth: “I’m pretty happy right now,” says Reznor.
“Wait!” he shouts. “Don’t print that! You’ll ruin my reputation. At least lie and say that I’ve got a dead body in my closet or something.”
While he might be in danger of blowing his rep as the master of the morose, Reznor’s got a lot to smile about. He’s about to release his first record since 1999’s lukewarmly received The Fragile (which itself followed 1994’s fantastically successful, multi-Platinum The Downward Spiral), and the dates on the upcoming tour sold out almost instantly. Most important, for the first time since the band’s early days, Reznor’s doing it all while stone-cold sober. “It’s amazing,” he says. “I feel like I’ve got a new brain, and I can’t wait to try it out. If I wasn’t on tour right now, I’d be home finishing up all the songs I’ve got for the next album.”