Trent Reznor doesn’t seem to be interested in releasing new Nine Inch Nails music right now

Trent Reznor has admitted that he doesn’t think the environment is right to release new Nine Inch Nails music, and he doesn’t particularly want to tour, either.

In a huge new two-hour interview on Rick Rubin’s Tetragrammaton podcast, father-of-five Trent admits that the pandemic was a “revelation” for him in terms of realising that his priorities are very much staying at home and being a family man. “I don’t really want to do anything right now,” he says. “I want to feel okay and I want to make sure my family’s okay. And that’s okay.”

Trent adds that, “I don’t want to be away from my kids, not that much. I don’t want to miss their lives out to go and do a thing I am grateful to be able to do and I’m appreciative that you’re here to see it, but I’ve done it a lot.”

His reasons for not especially wanting to release new NIN music are very different, though, with the culture and “lack of importance of music in today’s world” from his perspective leaving him feeling “a little defeated”.

“It feels to me in general – and I’m saying this as a 57-year-old man – music used to be the thing; that was what I was doing,” Trent explains. “When I had time I was listening to music. I wasn’t doing it in the background while I was doing five other things, and I wasn’t treating it kind of like a disposable commodity. I don’t go to the cinema and do my taxes while movies are playing. I’m there to watch a movie.

“I kind of miss the attention music got; the critical attention music got, not that I’m that interested in a critic’s opinion, but to send something out into the world and feel like it touched places. It might have got a negative or positive [response] but somebody heard it. It got validated in its own way, culturally. That feels askew [now]…

“That makes for a less fertile environment to put music out into, in the world of Nine Inch Nails.”

Nevertheless, Trent is working, and he teases that he’s doing stuff that isn’t music, and it’s more “around storytelling”. So watch this space…

Read this: How Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross became Hollywood royalty