Ares

But that’s also the problem: Since when has Nine Inch Nails gone unnoticed anywhere? The pleasure of the people playing this music is obvious and infectious, but it’s hard to shake the idea that despite their effectiveness, the hardest-charging songs here feel incomplete, that the film score’s mandate not to draw too much attention to itself hampers the songs’ ability to fully bloom on their own terms. Not since Lil Nas X flipped “34 Ghosts IV” into “Old Town Road” has a Nine Inch Nails song felt so in need of a remix.

Reznor and Ross’ best scores tend not to make the kind of bold statements they do so well with Nine Inch Nails, though. They operate more like a perfume whose scent is unmistakable in any kind of room. It’s a little standoffish, a little distant, with heartbreak heavily implied. It’s music that sounds like it’s made peace with desperation, in other words, and they do it superbly here. “100% Expendable” is built from a bank of lightly detuned synths that tremble faintly the longer their chords are held. The tone—harsh, brassy, like trumpets with bayonets—feels like a direct callback to Wendy Carlos’ A Clockwork Orange score, the latter’s menace replaced by the damp resignation of Radiohead’s “Exit Music (For a Film).” They pick the theme up again in “Building Better Worlds,” sculpting a cyber-hymn that crumbles into pixels as it’s being built. This is an album where something as minor as the live-wire buzz that runs behind “Daemonize” is trusted with carrying great emotional weight and succeeds.

It’s precisely this kind of care that elevates “Who Wants to Live Forever?”, the best of the album’s four vocal songs and among the most affecting and approachable Reznor has ever written. On its face, it’s a straightforward piece of Oscar bait that the rubber-pants-era Reznor wouldn’t have been caught dead performing. The tender, quivering duet he shares with Spanish singer Judeline is wrapped around a melody that pushes his voice to a height it can’t quite hit. “I don’t want to be here anymore,” he sings, and the piano blooms and sighs behind him, its tone shifting between light and dark with every chord change. In the foreground, pink pops of sound dot across the track, their slow drift like digital cherry blossoms falling on a vintage ad-board. Is it hammy? Yeah, it’s a little hammy; you might think of “Defying Gravity” when you hear it. But it’s an incredibly effective piece of musical theater, too, and it’s made more complex when the same melody goes sour in the ruins of “Building Better Worlds,” the very next song. Not even the misty-eyed beauty of yearning lasts.

Tron: Ares, the Nine Inch Nails album, is being released nearly a month before Tron: Ares, the blockbuster film, so we don’t know yet precisely what kind of story Reznor and Ross are trying to tell through this music. This is probably for the best: It’s difficult to think of the possibility of “Who Wants to Live Forever?” being sung from the perspective of an AI longing to return to its digital planet and not have it ruin the song a little bit. Then again, it seems churlish to expect Trent Reznor to still be hacking away at the cutting edge of darkness four decades into his career. Over time, affect becomes aesthetics, pain becomes another color in the palette. Maybe. Maybe something can come from the heart without breaking it. Maybe you don’t have to hurt yourself to see if you still feel.