Nine Inch Noize Is Here, And It Rocks

When Nine Inch Nails and Boys Noize announced their collaborative record Nine Inch Noize via Coachella billboard last week, we wondered what the end result might be: A live album? A remix collection? A whole new collaboration? Now, the album is out, and we're still not quite sure what to call it. It's a live album and a remix collection and a whole new collaboration. Also, it kicks ass.

Nine Inch Nails and Boys Noize worked together on the soundtracks for Challengers and Tron: Ares, but the full album is an adaptation of the live mini-sets that they played together throughout NIN's amazing Peel It Black tour, as well as the Coachella set that they played last weekend. Together with Boys Noize, NIN have revisited a bunch of old and not-so-old tracks, focusing on the clubby side of their catalog and blowing that out into blaring, skittering arena-rave. It has none of the ragged bootleg quality of a live album, even if it's partially that. Instead, this thing has the kind of immersive sound design that NIN bring to their studio records, and this is partially that, too. It sounds huge.

NIN dropped the Nine Inch Noize tracklist a few days ago, and it draws from all across the group's history. There's a pretty lot of stuff from this century — three Year Zero tracks, one from the Not The Actual Events EP, "Copy Of A." Trent Reznor's wife and How To Destroy Angels bandmate Mariqueen Maandig add vocals throughout, and they include the HTDA track "Parasite." But they also go back to the cover of Soft Cell's "Memorabilia" that was originally released as a '90s B-side, and we get the best version of "Closer" since the viral video of that guy singing it over the Ghostbusters theme in a karaoke bar.

Nine Inch Noize presents Nine Inch Nails as something other than the '90s alt-rock giants that we know they are. I don't know if I'd call it futuristic, since the dance sounds at work here are blog-house and electro and big-blurt dubstep, but those sounds are all having revivals of their own at the moment. Parts of it sound like industrial in the EBM sense, not the '90s goggles-over-dreadlocks one. The drum programming is nuts, and the bass explodes everywhere. This is just a very cool piece of work. I'm having a blast with it. Stream it below.

Nine Inch Noize is out now on the Null Corporation/Interscope.