Trent Reznor

• 1. Introduction

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  Trent Reznor once worked at Right Track Studio in Cleveland as an assistant engineer and janitor. Studio owner Bart Koster remembered his employee this way: "He is so focused in everything he does. When that guy waxed the floor, it looked great."

  That focus carried a college dropout to the front of Nine Inch Nails, the industrial rock band he founded in 1988. It later carried him into film and television, where he scores movies for major directors.

  The route was never straight. It passed through a house with a notorious past, a courtroom, and a very public argument with the music industry.

  How does a young man from small-town Pennsylvania end up here? Why would an artist give an album away for free and urge a crowd to steal his music? And how much of the darkness in his work was real?

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• 2. Small Town Beginnings

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  Michael Trent Reznor was born in New Castle, Pennsylvania, on the 17th of May 1965 and grew up in Mercer. His family is of German and Irish descent. His great-grandfather George founded the Reznor Company, a heating and air conditioning manufacturer, in 1884.

  When Reznor was six, his parents divorced. His sister Tera stayed with their mother, while he went to live with his maternal grandparents.

  He began playing piano at the age of 12 and showed early talent. His grandfather told People in February 1995 that Reznor was a Boy Scout who loved to skateboard and build model planes. Music, the grandfather said, was his life from the time he was a wee boy.

  In a September 1994 interview with Rolling Stone, Reznor described a childhood where nothing was going on but the cornfields. He said his view of the world came from movies, television, books and magazines. You are almost taught, he added, to realize such opportunities are not for you. In April 1995, however, he told Details that he did not want to give the impression it was a miserable childhood.

  The first concert Reznor ever saw was the Eagles, in 1976. He remembered thinking that someday he would love to be up on that stage.

  At Mercer Area Junior/Senior High School, he played tenor saxophone and tuba in both the jazz band and the marching band. Classmates gave him the "Best in Drama" accolade for playing Judas in Jesus Christ Superstar and Professor Harold Hill in The Music Man. While still a student, he joined a local band called Option 30, which played three shows a week. After graduating in 1983, he enrolled at Allegheny College in Meadville to study computer engineering.

  After a year of college, Reznor dropped out and moved to Cleveland, Ohio, to chase a music career. His first band there, the Urge, played covers. In 1985 he joined The Innocent as keyboardist, and the group released one album, Livin' in the Street. He left after three months.

  In 1986 he joined Exotic Birds, who appeared as a fictional band called The Problems in the 1987 film Light of Day. Along the way he played keyboards for Slam Bamboo and briefly joined the new wave band Lucky Pierre.

  At the Cleveland studio, Koster agreed to let Reznor record demos of his own songs for free during unused studio time. Koster said the favor cost him just a little wear on his tape heads. Nine of those demos were released unofficially in 1994 as Purest Feeling, and many were reworked for Reznor's first official album.

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• 3. Building Nine Inch Nails

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  The earliest Nine Inch Nails recordings had a problem. Reznor could not find a band able to play his songs the way he heard them. Inspired by Prince, he played every instrument except drums himself, and he kept that approach on most studio recordings.

  Several labels responded warmly to his demos, and he signed with TVT Records. Nine Inch Nails began in 1988, with Reznor as its only official member.

  Pretty Hate Machine arrived in 1989. It was a moderate success that stayed popular mostly with underground audiences, and it was certified Gold in 1992.

  In the summer of 1991, Nine Inch Nails joined the Lollapalooza tour. Meanwhile, the record label was pressing Reznor for a follow-up to Pretty Hate Machine. He answered by secretly recording under various pseudonyms to keep the company from interfering. That work became the 1992 EP Broken. In 1993, the band won a Grammy Award for Best Heavy Metal Performance with the song "Wish".

  The Downward Spiral entered the Billboard 200 in 1994 at number two. It remains the best-selling Nine Inch Nails release in America.

  To record it, Reznor moved into 10050 Cielo Drive, the mansion where the Manson Family carried out the Tate-LaBianca murders in 1969. He built a studio inside and named it Le Pig. The name came from the word scrawled on the front door in Sharon Tate's blood.

  Reznor told Entertainment Weekly that he looked at many places and this one was simply the one he liked most. He said he was drawn to the house by his interest in American folklore. He also stressed that he did not want to support serial-killer nonsense.

  The band toured extensively after the album. It played Woodstock '94, where Reznor admitted to the audience that he did not like playing large venues. Around this time, his studio perfectionism, struggles with addiction and bouts of writer's block stretched out the making of the next record.

  The double album The Fragile came out in 1999. Reviews were generally positive, but it lost money for his label. Reznor paid for the North American Fragility Tour out of his own pocket.

  Six more years passed before With Teeth appeared in 2005, and it reached number one on the Billboard 200. The next record, Year Zero in 2007, would pull Reznor into a very public argument with his label.

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• 4. Fighting the Industry

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  In May 2007, Reznor posted a message on the Nine Inch Nails website attacking Universal Music Group, the parent company of his label Interscope Records. He called its retail pricing of Year Zero in Australia "ABSURD". He wrote that a true fan was rewarded by getting ripped off.

  The post drew considerable media attention. In September 2007, at a concert in Australia, he urged the crowd to "steal and steal and steal some more and give it to all your friends and keep on stealin'."

  After Year Zero, Nine Inch Nails split from its contractual obligations with Interscope and chose to distribute its next major albums independently. In May 2008, Reznor founded The Null Corporation. He released two albums on his own label, Ghosts I-IV and The Slip.

  The Slip went online as a free download on the band's website. Reznor said simply, "This one's on me." A month and a half later, it had been downloaded 1.4 million times.

  Reznor pushed the same idea on rapper Saul Williams, whose 2007 album The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of NiggyTardust! he co-produced. He convinced Williams to release it as a free download. Fans could pay $5 for higher quality files or take lower quality files for nothing.

  In February 2009, Reznor wrote on NIN.com: "I've been thinking for some time now it's time to make NIN disappear for a while." The group went on hiatus after the Wave Goodbye Tour. Reznor said it would not tour in the foreseeable future, though he had not stopped making music.

  While on tour in Prague in 2009, Reznor noticed heavy promotion for Radiohead's upcoming tour and very little for his own. At a 2012 panel with David Byrne and Josh Kun, he said a major label's marketing outweighed the perks of independence. Those perks were releasing albums whenever he liked, avoiding leaks, and keeping a larger cut of sales.

  His first major-label release after the break was An Omen, an EP by How to Destroy Angels, through Columbia Records in November 2012. He said working with Columbia had so far been "pleasantly pleasant". In 2013, he returned to Columbia for Hesitation Marks, the eighth Nine Inch Nails studio album. It came out that September.

  In January 2013, Reznor and TopSpin Media founder Ian Rogers were chosen to lead Project Daisy, a new music subscription service from Beats Electronics. Reznor became chief creative officer. He promised a service like having your own guy at the record store, one who knows what you like but can point you down paths you would not have found alone. The service launched in the United States on the 21st of January 2014.

  Reznor stayed on after Beats came under Apple's ownership and helped with the launch of Apple Music. He later left, saying the work felt at odds with the artist in him.

  In May 2025, Reznor and Ross announced Future Ruins, a one-day music and arts festival planned for November 2025 at the Los Angeles Equestrian Center. It focused on film score composers, alongside DJ sets of electronic music. The billing included John Carpenter, Danny Elfman, Ben Salisbury and Geoff Barrow, Claudio Simonetti's Goblin, Cristobal Tapia de Veer, and Volker Bertelmann, known as Hauschka. On the 3rd of October 2025, the festival was cancelled because of "logistical challenges and complications."

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• 5. Screens and Games

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  When Reznor read the script for The Social Network, he realized what director David Fincher was up to and said goodbye to the free time he had planned. He and Atticus Ross scored the 2010 drama about the founding of Facebook. Critics noted that the music portrayed "Mark Zuckerberg the genius, developing a brilliant idea over ominous undertones", and the score received nearly unanimous praise. It was released that October in several formats, including 5.1 surround on Blu-ray and vinyl. A five-song sampler EP was free to download.

  Reznor's film work started long before that. In 1994 he produced the soundtrack for Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers, using a portable Pro Tools setup in his hotel room. Nine Inch Nails recorded "Burn" for the film. For The Crow soundtrack, the group covered Joy Division's "Dead Souls".

  In 1997 he produced the soundtrack for David Lynch's Lost Highway. He made two pieces of the score, "Driver Down" and "Videodrones; Questions", with Peter Christopherson. He tried to bring Coil onto the soundtrack but could not convince Lynch. Nine Inch Nails recorded "The Perfect Drug" for it, and Mark Romanek directed the video.

  In 2001, Romanek asked Reznor to score One Hour Photo. The music did not work for the film and went unused, but the compositions eventually became the album Still. Reznor was also credited as musical consultant on the 2004 film Man on Fire, which features six Nine Inch Nails songs.

  On the 7th of January 2011, Reznor announced that he and Ross would score Fincher's American adaptation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. A cover of Led Zeppelin's "Immigrant Song", with Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs singing, accompanied the film's trailer. The pair scored the film as it was shot, working from the idea of giving Fincher music the minute he started to edit. Reznor said in 2014 that this was a lot more work and that he would hesitate to go as far in that direction again.

  For Gone Girl, Fincher told Reznor about a chiropractor's office where the music was inauthentically trying to make him feel okay. That became the metaphor for the film. Reznor's challenge was to find the musical equivalent of a façade of comfort and insincerity, to instill doubt and remind listeners that things are not always what they seem. The soundtrack came out on Columbia on the 30th of September 2014.

  At a keynote session at a film and TV music conference on the 5th of November 2014, Reznor said he was open to working with other filmmakers. Fincher was then the only director he had composed for. He praised Fincher's pursuit and dedication to uncompromised excellence.

  In December 2014, it was announced that Reznor would work with composer Mike Patton on Fincher's sequel, The Girl Who Played With Fire. After the 2015 book The Girl in the Spider's Web, Sony decided to reboot the franchise and cancelled the production.

  Other directors soon followed. In 2016, Reznor and Ross scored Fisher Stevens's climate change documentary Before the Flood and Peter Berg's Boston Marathon crime drama Patriots Day. In 2017, they made their television debut with Ken Burns and Lynn Novick's 10-part documentary The Vietnam War.

  In 2018, they scored Jonah Hill's directorial debut Mid90s and Susanne Bier's Netflix film Bird Box. A Bird Box box set of extra material followed. In a December 2019 interview with Revolver, Reznor called the Bird Box experience a waste of time. He blamed an editing department that mixed the score too low and a production team he said was phoning it in.

  Reznor also revealed that he and Ross had walked away from Joe Wright's The Woman in the Window. They scrapped their finished score after the studio transformed the film following test screenings. The film was sold to Netflix and released in 2021 with Danny Elfman as composer.

  Both Reznor and Ross were fans of Alan Moore's 1987 comic Watchmen, so they approached Damon Lindelof about his HBO sequel series in 2019. They released three volumes of music over the course of the broadcast. The score was critically acclaimed and won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Music Composition for a Limited Series in 2020.

  That same year they reunited with Fincher for Mank and scored their first animated project, Pixar's Soul. In 2021, they won a Golden Globe and an Academy Award alongside Jon Batiste for the Soul score. Reznor and Ross have now won the Academy Award for Best Original Score twice, for The Social Network and Soul. They also won Grammy Awards for scoring The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Soul.

  In 2022 came Luca Guadagnino's Bones and All and Sam Mendes's Empire of Light. In 2023 the pair scored Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem and reunited with Fincher for The Killer. In 2024, they scored two more Guadagnino films, Challengers and Queer, and wrote the title theme for the HBO comedy series The Franchise. In 2025, they scored Tron: Ares under the Nine Inch Nails name, along with Scott Derrickson's The Gorge and Guadagnino's After the Hunt.

  Video games have drawn Reznor in as well. The original music for id Software's 1996 game Quake is credited to "Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails". Reznor helped record sound effects and ambient audio, and the NIN logo appears on the nailgun ammunition boxes.

  His link with id began because he was a fan of the original Doom. In 2003 he returned as sound engineer for Doom 3, but he abandoned the project because of "time, money and bad management", and his audio work never reached the final release.

  The 2007 album Year Zero shipped with an accompanying alternate reality game. Its lyrics were written from the viewpoint of several fictitious characters. Reznor described it as a concept album criticizing United States government policy and how it would affect the world 15 years in the future.

  In July 2012, it was announced that Reznor had composed and performed the theme music for Call of Duty: Black Ops II. In December 2024, it was announced that he and Ross would score Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet.

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• 6. Company He Keeps

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  In 1990, Reznor sang on a cover of Black Sabbath's "Supernaut" for 1000 Homo DJs, a side project of the band Ministry. Because of legal issues with his label, his vocals had to be distorted until his voice was unrecognizable. Fans still debate which recorded version is Reznor and which is Ministry's Al Jourgensen. It has been definitively stated that Reznor's vocals were used on the Black Box set from TVT Records.

  That year he also performed with Revolting Cocks, another Jourgensen side project. He said of it: "It was decadence on a new level, but with a sense of humor."

  In 1991, Reznor sang on the Pigface track "Suck" from their first album Gub, which had production work from Steve Albini. In 1994, he sang backing vocals on "Past the Mission" from Tori Amos's album Under the Pink.

  Reznor produced Marilyn Manson's first album, Portrait of an American Family, in 1994. He then worked on several tracks of Smells Like Children and Antichrist Superstar. Of the last, he recalled that it was a way of staying on tour mentally, with every night some ridiculous scenario. When it finished, he felt low and disillusioned.

  The friendship later soured. Manson said: "It got too competitive. And he can't expect me not to want to be more successful than him."

  In 1998, Reznor produced a remix of The Notorious B.I.G.'s "Victory", featuring Busta Rhymes. He also spent nearly 10 years in a project called Tapeworm with Danny Lohner, Maynard James Keenan and Atticus Ross. It ended before any official release. Its only known released traces are a reworked track called "Vacant", retitled "Passive", on A Perfect Circle's 2004 album eMOTIVe, and "Potions (Deliverance Mix)" on Puscifer's 2009 remix EP.

  In 2006, Reznor played his first solo shows at Neil Young's annual Bridge School Benefit. Backed by a four-piece string section, he performed stripped-down versions of Nine Inch Nails songs. In 2007 he provided guest vocals on "Flyentology" from El-P's album I'll Sleep When You're Dead. He also produced songs for Jane's Addiction at his home studio in Beverly Hills, California.

  In November 2012, Reznor revealed on Reddit that he was working with Queens of the Stone Age on a song for their album ...Like Clockwork. He had worked with them once before, singing backing vocals on the title track of Era Vulgaris in 2007. Josh Homme later revealed that Reznor was originally meant to produce the album.

  In January 2013, Reznor appeared in Sound City, a documentary directed by Dave Grohl, formerly of Nirvana and later of the Foo Fighters. It tells the story of Sound City Studios in Van Nuys, California, which has housed some of the most famed names in music since 1969. The film was an official selection at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival and became available for download on the 1st of February 2013. Reznor contributed to the track "Mantra" with Grohl and Homme.

  At the 2014 Grammy Awards ceremony, Reznor performed with Lindsey Buckingham of Fleetwood Mac, Dave Grohl and Queens of the Stone Age. He later said he had weighed the pros and cons at length. He doubted he wanted to be part of a television show or be affiliated with the Grammys. He did want to reach a large audience and do something with integrity on his own terms, so he decided to roll the dice.

  Lil Nas X's "Old Town Road" heavily sampled the 2008 Nine Inch Nails instrumental "34 Ghosts IV". The song reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in April 2019 and stayed there a record 19 weeks. Reznor and Ross both received songwriting and production credit. Reznor cleared the sample and voiced support for the song, but he declined to appear in the music video.

  In 2020, Reznor worked with Tobacco on the song "Baby Sitter" for the album Hot Wet and Sassy, after the two had toured together in 2017. In 2021, he and Ross produced Halsey's fourth studio album, If I Can't Have Love, I Want Power, released on the 27th of August 2021. They recorded instrumentation in a Los Angeles studio while Halsey sang at a studio in the Turks and Caicos Islands. The album largely abandoned her usual pop style for a heavier industrial approach and earned critical acclaim.

  In 2023, Reznor and Ross joined Dave Sitek and Hudson Mohawke in the virtual supergroup WitchGang. Their song "Nothing's Alright" was released that December.

  Atticus Ross has been Reznor's frequent collaborator since 2002. In 2016, he became the second official member of Nine Inch Nails. As a duo, they released a trilogy of EPs from 2016 to 2018, joined by a loose concept but spanning a wide variety of styles. Not the Actual Events in 2016 returned to the heavier industrial sound of the 1990s. Add Violence in 2017 focused on a more electronic sound, and Bad Witch in 2018 ventured into experimental jazz.

  In April 2010, it was announced that Reznor had formed a new band called How to Destroy Angels with his wife, Mariqueen Maandig, and Ross. The group digitally released a self-titled six-song EP on the 1st of June 2010. For the soundtrack of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, they covered Bryan Ferry's "Is Your Love Strong Enough?" Their first full-length album, Welcome Oblivion, was released on the 5th of March 2013.

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• 7. Shadows and Sobriety

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  When a group of fans heard that Reznor's dog had died, some responded that it was good for his music when he is depressed. One said it was good to see him back in Hell, where he belongs. Pain and sorrow had become that closely tied to his image.

  In 1995, People magazine described his work as "self-loathing, sexual obsession, torture and suicide over a thick sludge of gnashing guitars and computer-synthesized beats". It added that he had built his name on theatrics and nihilism, like Alice Cooper and Ozzy Osbourne before him. Nine Inch Nails concerts were often picketed by fundamentalist Christians.

  His former high school band director remembered Reznor as "very upbeat and friendly" and suspected that "all that 'dark avenging angel' stuff is marketing". The owner of the studio where Pretty Hate Machine was recorded disagreed about the stage act. "It's planned, but it is not contrived," he said. "He's pulling that stuff out from inside somewhere. You cannot fake that delivery."

  The truth had a harder edge offstage. For five years after The Downward Spiral in 1994, Reznor suffered from depression. It was worsened by the death of his maternal grandmother, who had raised him. He began abusing alcohol, cocaine and other drugs, and an attempt at rehab failed.

  While on tour in London in 2000, he overdosed on China White, a fentanyl analog he had mistaken for cocaine. He returned to rehab and completed it in 2001. In 2006, he said a persona had run its course and he needed to get his priorities straight. He took a couple of years off to figure out who he was and whether he wanted to keep doing this. He added that he was now "pretty happy".

  Sobriety brought a harder reckoning with money. Reznor said he began to understand his finances only after tackling his addiction. In 2003, he asked his former manager John Malm Jr. for a financial statement and discovered he had only $400,000 in liquid assets. He told the court, "It was not pleasant discovering you have a tenth as much as you've been told you have."

  In 2004, Malm filed a suit against Reznor for over $2 million in deferred commissions. He alleged that Reznor had reneged on every contract the two ever entered into. Weeks later, Reznor filed a counter-suit in the U.S. District Court of New York, charging Malm with fraud and breach of fiduciary duties.

  The counter-suit centered on a five-year management contract signed in the early days of Nine Inch Nails. It said the contract gave Malm 20% of Reznor's gross earnings rather than his net earnings. It also said Malm kept that percentage even after he stopped representing Reznor and on all of Reznor's album advances. The suit further said Malm had misappropriated ownership rights to Nine Inch Nails, including the trademark name.

  Malm testified that Reznor had given him half of the trademark as a gift. His lawyers claimed that he had worked for years pro bono. They blamed Reznor's inability to release an album or tour, and his uninhibited spending, for his financial state.

  After a three-week trial in 2005, jurors sided with Reznor. They awarded him upwards of $2.95 million and returned complete control of his trademarks. After adjusting for inflation, the award rose to nearly $5 million.

  Reznor lived for many years in the Garden District of New Orleans. In 2005, he sold his home to actor John Goodman and moved to Los Angeles. In October 2009, he married Filipino-American singer Mariqueen Maandig. They live in Los Angeles and have six children.

  In 2023, Reznor explained why Nine Inch Nails was no longer his priority. "I don't want to be away from my kids," he said, adding that he did not want to miss their lives. He said he prefers working on film scores because the environment for releasing Nine Inch Nails music is less fertile, and scoring has thrust him into places he would not otherwise be.

  At the end of 2025, his tone changed. "We are working on new stuff and we're excited to work on it," he said, adding that the band was now a priority. The difference from a year earlier, he said, was that "the fuse has been lit and the desire is there."

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• 8. Influences and Legacy

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  In the summer of 1986, Reznor drove with friends to the Blossom Music Center amphitheatre to see Depeche Mode on their Black Celebration tour. He had dropped out of college and was living in Cleveland, knowing where he wanted to go but not how to get there. He recalled leaving the show grateful, humbled, energized and in awe of how transformative music can be. He started writing what would eventually become Pretty Hate Machine. Now, when he plays amphitheatres, he thinks of that night and hopes someone in the crowd is having a perfect summer night of their own.

  Reznor possesses a baritone vocal range. When he formed Nine Inch Nails, he said he was influenced most by the Clash, even trying to imitate them outright. English musician Gary Numan was another early influence. Hearing Numan's song "Cars" told Reznor he wanted to make music with synthesizers. That influence resurfaced in the 2005 Nine Inch Nails song "Only", whose disco-style beats and synthesizers draw on Numan's style.

  Soft Cell and OMD, two English synth-pop acts, gained a foothold on American radio during his youth. College radio introduced him to Bauhaus, Joy Division and Throbbing Gristle. He named Bauhaus singer Peter Murphy as one of his idols. He called the first Nine Inch Nails song he wrote, "Down in It", a "total rip-off" of "Dig It", a 1986 song by the Canadian band Skinny Puppy.

  Reznor called Coil's 1986 album Horse Rotorvator "deeply influential". He has also named The Cars, Devo, The Jesus and Mary Chain, My Bloody Valentine, Pere Ubu, Prince, Ministry, Test Dept, Cabaret Voltaire and The Cure's 1985 album The Head on the Door. According to Todd Rundgren, Reznor told him he listened to Rundgren's 1973 album A Wizard, a True Star with great regularity. Reznor also said Rush's 1982 album Signals showed him how keyboards could enter hard rock.

  David Bowie's 1977 album Low is among Reznor's favorites, and he listened to it constantly while recording The Downward Spiral. In 1995, Nine Inch Nails toured as a co-headliner on the North American leg of Bowie's Outside Tour. In the video for Bowie's "I'm Afraid of Americans" in 1997, Reznor plays a stalker who shows up wherever Bowie goes. He also made several remixes for the single and for "The Hearts Filthy Lesson". In a 2016 Rolling Stone article written after Bowie's death, Reznor said touring with Bowie in 1995-96 inspired him to stay sober. The two considered each other friends.

  Reznor says his influence ranges from "generic imitations" that appeared after the band's first success to younger bands echoing his style in a "truer, less imitative way". After The Downward Spiral, Bowie compared the impact of Nine Inch Nails to that of The Velvet Underground. In 1997, Time magazine listed Reznor among the year's most influential people, and Spin magazine called him "the most vital artist in music".

  In 2007, producer Bob Ezrin called Reznor a "true visionary" and told aspiring artists to note his no-compromise attitude. That year Reznor accepted the Kerrang! Icon award at the Kerrang! Awards in London. Axl Rose of Guns N' Roses, an early supporter, was heavily influenced by Reznor while writing and composing Chinese Democracy.

  Steven Wilson of Porcupine Tree admires Reznor's production on The Fragile. In 2008 he said Reznor was the only one he would let near his music. Indonesian singer Anggun called Reznor "the man of my musical life" and The Fragile "the album that changed my life." Musician Greg Puciato wrote in Revolver that he listened to Broken from front to back at age 12. Timbaland has named Reznor his favorite studio producer.

  Drummer Chris Pennie of the Dillinger Escape Plan said The Fragile shifted his compositional mindset from drums to production. He was "blown away" by its dense yet elegant mix and vocal ideas. He named it one of his two favorite albums of all time.

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