1988-Trent ReznorVocals, various instruments
Atticus RossKeyboards, bass2016-
Founded in 1988 by Trent Reznor in Cleveland, Ohio, Nine Inch Nails (NIN) are commonly referred to as an industrial-rock act, but they defy genre convention, drawing musical inspiration from hardcore industrial bands like Skinny Puppy and Throbbing Gristle while incorporating solo piano ballads, synth-pop variations and even elements of drum & bass into their sound.
Reznor was the only official member of the project until 2016, when frequent collaborator Atticus Ross joined the group. Throughout NIN's career, Reznor has used backing and session musicians for recording projects and live performances.
As a studio engineer, and fresh out of the bands The Innocent and Exotic Birds, Reznor started his own project, borrowing John Malm Jr. from Exotic Birds as his informal manager. At the time, he worked as a janitor and an assistant for Right Track Studios, where he recorded his first demos. Unable to find like-minded individuals that suited his artistic needs, Reznor played most of the instruments himself and went on to support Skinny Puppy at select concerts.
Reznor's NIN signed with TVT Records and recorded nine demo tracks in late 1988. Versions of many of these tracks were later included on NIN's first full-length album,
Pretty Hate Machine, released in 1989.
There was much speculation about the project's name, perhaps alluding to the nine-inch nails used for the crucifixion of Jesus or to Freddy Kreuger's nails from the horror franchise
A Nightmare on Elm Street. Reznor disputed any literal meaning, claiming he chose the moniker because it abbreviated well and made a good logo.
"It seemed kind of frightening - tough and manly," he told
Axcess Magazine in 2004. "It's a curse trying to come up with band names."
In 1989, Reznor collaborated with Adrian Sherwood, Mark "Flood" Ellis, John Fryer and Keith LeBlanc on the production of the album
Pretty Hate Machine, which includes the now-classic NIN singles "
Head Like A Hole" and "
Down In It." This album was one of the first independently released albums to ever achieve Platinum status.
In 1990, NIN hit the road for The Pretty Hate Machine Tour Series, opening for Peter Murphy and The Jesus and Mary Chain. This tour developed into a world tour that continued through the Lollapalooza tour in 1991. Reznor's onstage antics became increasingly aggressive, resulting in smashed equipment and ecstatic fans.
After becoming disillusioned with the TVT record label and trying to record music under various pseudonyms to get around the label's insistence that Nine Inch Nails assume a more synth-pop sound for their follow-up album, Reznor and Flood started recording in secret. TVT eventually traded NIN over to Interscope, which encouraged Reznor to make the music he wanted to and also helped him set up his own label, Nothing. In 1992, NIN released Broken, an EP featuring six songs and two bonus tracks. It was the first release issued by Nothing. Heavier and harder than Pretty Hate Machine, Broken included the track "Wish," which won NIN a Grammy for Best Metal Performance in 1993.
Having moved into an LA residence infamous for being the site where followers of cult leader Charles Manson murdered actress Sharon Tate and four others, Trent Reznor continued to be dogged by controversy when the music video for the Broken track "Happiness In Slavery" was widely banned. The footage shows performance artist Bob Flanagan naked on a machine that pleasured, tortured and eventually killed him. Continuing along these graphic lines, Reznor's videos for the instrumental tracks "Pinion" and "Help Me I'm In Hell" feature a toilet flushing into the mouth of a person in bondage and a young man kidnapped, tortured and killed, respectively. These videos were part of a short film titled Broken - a companion piece to the EP - that wasn't officially released in its entirety until years later.
Living and recording at his LA home dubbed Le Pig, Reznor chose to record rather than tour and began work on
The Downward Spiral, released in 1994. Influenced by David Bowie and Pink Floyd,
The Downward Spiral features a range of moods as the music seems to follow the psychological development of a central character. The most successful Nine Inch Nails album to date, the album's success was anchored by the singles "
Closer," "
Hurt" (nominated for a Grammy and later covered by Johnny Cash), "March Of The Pigs" and "Piggy." The video for "Closer," directed by Mark Romanek, received heavy rotation on MTV and MTV2 after extensive editing, as the original was considered too graphic once again for most watchers. The video is an industrial take on the lab of a 19th century mad scientist, complete with animal cruelty, religious symbols including a monkey suffering crucifixion, graphic sexual images and a variety of S&M/bondage paraphernalia. Reznor himself dons an S&M mask while swinging in shackles, which only added to the controversial content.
In March 1994, Nine Inch Nails embarked on the Self Destruct Tour, culminating in a mud-drenched Woodstock '94 performance.
The Downward Spiral album and tour garnered NIN both critical acclaim and a horde of new fans, catapulting the relatively unknown industrial act onto the mainstream charts with significant, but censored, radio play. After the tour, Trent Reznor worked on several soundtrack projects. He produced the soundtrack for
Natural Born Killers, directed by Oliver Stone; developed the music and sound effects for the first-person shooter video game
Quake; and produced the soundtrack for David Lynch's
Lost Highway. The soundtrack for
Lost Highway spawned the NIN single "
The Perfect Drug." The video, which was directed by Mark Romanek, features a father mourning his dead son in a Gothic mansion while losing himself to absinthe addiction, perhaps prophetic of Reznor's later battles with alcoholism and drug addiction.
In 2005, NIN released their fourth full-length album,
With Teeth, written in the shadow of Reznor's battle with alcoholism and substance abuse. Singles included "
The Hand That Feeds" and "Every Day Is Exactly The Same." Like its 1999 predecessor,
The Fragile,
With Teeth topped the US albums chart, although it was slammed by some critics as being unoriginal and lacking in signature Reznor creativity.
NIN followed up With Teeth with their 2007 offering, Year Zero, a concept album critical of the US government's approach to politics. The album's story is set in 2022, in an America ravaged by terrorism now operating under a Christian theocracy while distributing a drug designed to make the masses apathetic. Rebel movements from 2022 travel back in time to warn 2007 Americans of the coming apocalypse. This album met with critical acclaim, but was a relative commercial failure, although it did reach #2 on the US chart. Reznor initially planned to create a movie adaptation of the album, and HBO and BBC subsequently expressed interest in developing a TV miniseries, both those plans didn't come to fruition.
In 2008, Reznor released two albums - Ghosts I-IV and The Slip - under creative commons license, making them available for free download on NIN's official website. The albums were surprisingly popular, receiving millions of collective downloads.
Trent Reznor appears fleetingly in the 1987 Michael J. Fox movie Light Of Day, where he's part of a synth-pop band who aren't very good.
In October 2009, Trent Reznor married Mariqueen Maandig, who sang in the Los Angeles-based band West Indian Girl. Early in their marriage, they had two sons, Lazarus Echo (born October 10, 2010) and Balthazar (born December 31, 2011). Reznor settled on his boys' names ahead of their births, but admitted to Scotland's
The Daily Record in 2014 that he would have had a battle on his hands with his in-laws if he'd had a daughter.
"With those names, the boys are going to have to learn how to fight," he laughed. "The in-laws are fine with it. The children were going to be stuck with those names regardless. But if there was a female, we were going to have a punch-up for sure."
It's not known if that familial battle occurred after the couple's third child - a daughter named Nova Lox - was born in 2016. Reznor and Maandig now have five children.
In 2009, before privacy was a major concern to most users, Trent Reznor released a Nine Inch Nails iPhone app with an innovative feature: Nearby, which let fans find other fans using the app in their area. The app didn't work very well and never caught on.
Stabbing Westward frontman Christopher Hall credits Nine Inch Nails for getting his band and other industrial acts signed to major labels. "They had amazing songs that were super edgy to be on the radio and made everyone feel edgy and dirty," he
told Songfacts. "When that happened, every record label in America - and this is what they always do, they're reactive as opposed to being proactive – they looked around and said, 'Where can we get one of them?'"
Filter frontman
Richard Patrick was a touring guitarist for Nine Inch Nails from 1989 to 1993. His only recorded contribution to NIN is a guitar drone that can be heard at the end of "
Sanctified."
Speaking on the podcast
Stop! Drop & Talk, Patrick cited comments from Trent Reznor as the motivating factor for him quitting Nine Inch Nails.
"The final straw was Trent goes, 'Hey, listen, Rich, I know you need some extra cash. Listen. Down at the end of Cielo Drive, there's a little pizzeria, and they need drivers. So maybe you can go make some extra cash over there,'" Patrick explained. "And I'm, like, 'Wow!'"
At that point Patrick had already written Filter's debut single, "
Hey Man Nice Shot," and had interest from several labels.
Nine Inch Nails entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2020. At the ceremony (virtual, due to coronavirus), the Rock Hall made it clear that Reznor was the group, but inducted six other members as well:
Chris Vrenna
Danny Lohner
Robin Finck
Atticus Ross
Alessandro Cortini
Ilan Rubin
Ross, Cortini, and Rubin didn't start working with NIN until the 2000s.
The original music video for their song "Down In It" sparked controversy when the helium weather balloon used to film the last scene, where Reznor lies seemingly dead and covered in corn starch while other band members walk off screen in weird costumes, escaped its mooring and ended up in a farmer's field. The farmer took the camera to the FBI suspecting marijuana surveillance footage.
Nine Inch Nails won a second Grammy Award in the Best Metal Performance category in 1996 for a live version of the Broken EP track "Happiness In Slavery" that appeared on the concert compilation album Woodstock 94. The album features highlights from various artists' sets at the Woodstock 1994 festival, which took place in Saugerties, New York.
In 2009, Reznor put NIN on indefinite hiatus while working on side projects, including the band How to Destroy Angels with his wife, Mariqueen Maandig, Atticus Ross, and visual designer Rob Sheridan. In 2010, Reznor teamed up with Ross for the first of many film-score collaborations, composing the soundtrack to the movie The Social Network. In 2011, Reznor and Ross won a Golden Globe and an Academy Award for Best Original Score for The Social Network. Since then, the duo have collaborated on the scores for over a dozen other films, including The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, Gone Girl, Mank, Soul, Challengers and Tron: Ares. Meanwhile, Nine Inch Nails ended their touring and recording hiatus in 2013.
Reznor and Ross' film collaborations outside of Nine Inch Nails garnered the musicians two Grammy Awards in the Best Score Soundtrack For Visual Media category: for The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo in 2012 and Soul in 2021.
Reznor and Ross became a formidable team for movie scores, known for highly evocative electronic backdrops that can send hearts racing, like in the tennis scenes from the 2025 movie Challengers. They won a Golden Globe for that one.
On April 17, 2026, Nine Inch Nails and German electronic-music artist and producer Alex Ridha (a.k.a. Boys Noize) released a collaborative album titled
Nine Inch Noize. The 12-track collection features remixed versions of various Nine Inch Nails songs, a tune by the Trent Reznor side project How To Destroy Angels, and a cover of Soft Cell's "Memorabilia." NIN originally recorded a version of "Memorabilia" in 1994, and released it as the B-side of their single "
Closer."
Boys Noize previously collaborated with Reznor on the remix album of Trent and Atticus Ross' score for the 2024 film
Challengers and on Nine Inch Nails' soundtrack for the 2025 movie
Tron: Ares. The
Tron: Ares soundtrack includes "As Alive As You Need Me To Be," which also is featured on
Nine Inch Noize. The tune won a Grammy for Best Rock Song in 2026.
