This morning Trent Reznor dropped the first single off the new Nine Inch Nails EP Add Violence. It’s the second in a planned trilogy that launched with last year’s Not the Actual Events. The song, “Less Than”, is vastly different in tone and spirit from the previous EP, which lends credibility to the rumor that Reznor and Atticus Ross have been writing music “on the fly”. He confirmed this in an interesting interview with Zane Lowe on Beat 1 this morning.
The third EP is “zero percent done, except for lyrics,” Reznor revealed when asked if we’d see it released before the end of 2017.
“[It will be released] if it’s ready [and] feels like it’s fully formed,” he added of the EP explaining that the duo that makes up Nine Inch Nails are finally done with their side projects and fully focused on touring and new material. With that said, they are circling potential films, which could potentially cause a delay in their creative process.
What they’re doing with the trilogy is something narratively different and provocative, and have been set in a place with a different perception. The idea is to revisit the creative process after the completion of each EP and then assemble a full-length album after it’s all said and done. “It’s conceptionally recontextualized into something different,” added Reznor before joking that they, “Wing it and see if it makes sense at the end and pretend you had a plan all along.”
Add Violence releases next Friday, July 21st.
