Nine Inch Nails: Tron: Ares (2025)

Tron: Ares. Music by Nine Inch Nails (2025)

I realised after making the Hesitation Marks (2013) post that I didn't want any of the really crap Nine Inch Nails releases on my main blog. That meant I didn't write anything about Not The Actual Events (2016), Add Violence (2017), Bad Witch (2018), or Ghosts V + VI (2020), all of which made me sigh for having dared hope they might take NIN back to its former glory.

Tron: Ares' first single, As Alive as You Need Me to Be, had a definite Fragile (1999) / With Teeth (2005) vibe, which gave me hope once again... but the end result was the same. I hoped. I bought. I sighed. [1]

But mostly I'm confused about why it even has the NIN moniker. With just a few exceptions, including As Alive as You Need Me to Be, it resembles a typical Reznor + Ross film score, which for me is something best summed up as lifeless, dull, musical enervation.

I'm no stranger to soundtracks, I've heard hundreds of them, so I know they don't always work when removed from the visual element they're designed to underscore and enhance, but, like I said above, that little word had crept in again: hope. I've zero interest in ever seeing the movie, so I'd hoped that the compositions would stand strong on their own. They don't. I don't know if the order that tracks are arranged on the CD matches the order they're heard in the movie, but structurally — as a standalone listening experience — it's unrewarding, wasteful, and listless.

If you enjoy the duo's score work, then jump right in, it might be just what you want. But if you wanted a NIN album in which 'songs' with lyrical content outnumber snippets of mediocre electronic audio, you won't find it here. A custom edit could help the flow, I suppose, or a short E.P. containing the four non-instrumentals (03, 07, 12, 24), but not all of those are good, either. As Alive as You Need Me to Be is the album's highlight; it's no surprise it was the lead single. The fact that the whole was promoted as a NIN album and not a Rez + Ross film score feels like a cheat - a cheap bait and switch from an industry that relies on them too often these days.

I'm off now to listen to The Fragile in its entirety, to help me forget that Tron: Ares exists.

[1] Reviews for some of the albums mentioned above can be found on my main blog, The 7th and Last. For the Nine Inch Nails posts only, click HERE. (Links open in a New Tab.)