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Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross Have a Plan to Soundtrack Everything

Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross found a new level of creative fulfillment (and a couple Oscars) by saying yes to fresh challenges. Now they’re plotting their grandest project yet.

I am old enough that my adolescence coincided neatly with the S&M-flavored, I wanna fuck you like an animal era of Nine Inch Nails; when I was leaving Reznor’s house one day, I noted with some amusement the cheerful mundanity of a basketball hoop in the backyard. One of the first things you see when you arrive at Reznor’s home studio are two original paintings by the artist Russell Mills—on the left, a razor against a rusty red background; on the right, a decaying yellow-and-black collage—that ultimately became the insert and the cover art for Nine Inch Nails’ The Downward Spiral. If I may, for a moment, sound like the aging dude in a black T-shirt leaning against the back wall of a bar where you’re just trying to be young and free of recitations of what the year 1994 felt like, there was a different quality to the way things would happen in music.

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