Nine Inch Nails Announce Details Regarding New Studio Album and Vinyl Reissues

Since Nine Inch Nails’ frontman Trent Reznor has turned his attention to writing and recording music for movie soundtracks, the former Clevelander’s industrial rock band has sat on the back burner.

But just today, Reznor, who recently wrote the scores for NASA’s Juno short film, the climate change documentary Before the Flood (featuring the song “A Minute To Breathe”) and the Peter Berg film Patriots Day, announced that Nine Inch Nails will self-release Not the Actual Events, a new five- song EP, on Dec. 23.

“It’s an unfriendly, fairly impenetrable record that we needed to make,” says Reznor in a press release. “It’s an EP because that ended up being the proper length to tell that story.”

The pre-order for Not the Actual Events launched today on Nine Inch Nails’ redesigned website. Fans can pre-order the 180g vinyl and/or a unique limited digital and physical component version. The EP will be available on all digital platforms on Dec. 23.

Created by Reznor and Ross, a four-disc, 150-minute vinyl version of 1999’s The Fragile will feature 37 instrumental, alternate and unreleased tracks, many of which have never been heard before. The Fragile: Deviations 1 will not be available on any digital services.

“The Fragile occupies a very interesting and intimate place in my heart,” explains Reznor. “I was going through a turbulent time in my life when making it and revisiting it has become a form of therapy for me. As an experiment, I removed all the vocals from the record and found it became a truly changed experience that worked on a different yet compelling level. The Fragile: Deviations 1 represents Atticus and I embellishing the original record with a number of tracks from those sessions we didn’t use before. The result paints a complimentary but different picture we wanted to share.”

The press release announcing the new studio album and the reissue of The Fragile notes that Reznor and NIN art director John Crawford have begun “the meticulous process of creating ‘definitive editions’” of all the major NIN releases on vinyl. Fans can now pre-order the first three “definitive editions” of Broken, The Downward Spiral and the aforementioned The Fragile). They will then receive a digital download of the re-mastered audio, and the vinyl will ship in spring of 2017.

“We want to present the catalog as it was intended to be, with no compromises,” says Reznor. “That means a careful re-mastering of the audio from the original sources, a painstaking recreation of the artwork, pristine materials, some surprises and an insane attention to detail that you probably won’t notice…but it matters to us. No extra bullshit and gimmicks — the ‘real’ records in their truest form.”

This article appears in Dec 14-20, 2016.