While they continue to astonish audiences on their first North American tour in three years, Nine Inch Nails have unveiled the Maxime Quoilin-directed video for “As Alive As You Need Me To Be,” the lead single from their soundtrack to the upcoming film TRON: Ares. The latter is due Sept. 19 from Interscope, with the third film in the TRON franchise hitting theaters on Oct. 10.
Last night (Sept. 2) at Brooklyn, N.Y.’s Barclays Center, fans got an early glimpse at the “Alive” video on screens inside the venue and at subway stations outside. The propulsive track burbles with dance floor menace and the revving sound of the futuristic motorcycles frequently seen in TRON‘s in-film racing sequences. It was produced by Reznor and longtime collaborator Atticus Ross in tandem with Boys Noize, Ian Kirkpatrick, BJ Burton and Hudson Mohawke.
In all, NIN’s TRON: Ares soundtrack sports more than 70 minutes of new music from the group, whose last new albums were the simultaneous 2020 releases Ghosts V: Together and Ghosts VI: Locusts. “I’ll give a few spoilers: there’s not one second of orchestra in our score,” Reznor recently told Empire. “It sounds precise and unpleasant at times. It’s not an atonal, punishing score, but we spent a lot of time thinking about the undertones of what’s happening in the story. The concept of artificial life infused with feelings and emotions and a sense of questioning their purpose and their replaceability, their lack of soul, in some ways. We kind of riffed on that.”
The movie stars Jared Leto, Jeff Bridges, Greta Lee and Evan Peters in the follow-up to 2010’s Tron: Legacy, itself a long-in-the-works sequel to the classic 1982 original film. Daft Punk’s score for Tron: Legacy was a massive hit, reaching No. 4 on the Billboard 200 and selling more than a million copies in the United States, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. Wendy Carlos penned the score for the original movie.
Nine Inch Nails will be on the road through a Sept. 18-19 tour finale at Los Angeles’ Kia Forum. Reznor and Ross are also hosting the first Future Ruins festival, which will be held Nov. 8 at the Los Angeles Equestrian Center and feature performances by acclaimed film and TV music colleagues such as John Carpenter (Halloween, They Live, The Thing), Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein (Stranger Things, Lost in the Night), Devo’s Mark Mothersbaugh (The Life Aquatic, The Royal Tenenbaums, Rushmore) and Questlove presenting the score works of Curtis Mayfield.
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