The Janitorial Origins of Nine Inch Nails

It’s Cleveland, 1987, and Trent Reznor is working as a janitor and an assistant engineer at Right Track Studios. Offered free studio time in between bookings, Reznor begins recording demos of the different sounds stuck in his head, an amalgamation of Ministry and Skinny Puppy, and more industrial theatrics.

At first, Reznor, who was also playing keyboards in the synth-pop group Exotic Birds at the time, couldn’t find the musicians to bring the music he wanted to create to life in a studio, much less on stage.

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“I reached the point in my life where I either needed to do this or do something else,” said Reznor. “I wanted to be a musician. I had an idea of what I wanted to do with my life, but I had not put the work into it to get to that stage. For me, the whole project was an experiment to see what would happen if I focused all my energy into one thing: put my life out of balance and just work on it. That involved starting to write songs.”

Reznor added, “I think I’d always been kind of afraid because if they were terrible, I didn’t know what I was going to do with myself.”

Prince

Inspired by Prince‘s musical ambidextrousness, Trent went ahead and played all the instruments on his demos himself, with the exception of drums.

Eventually grouping up with keyboardist Chris Vrenna and drummer Ron Musarra, Nine Inch Nails — a name Reznor landed on since it formed a simple acronym, NIN — played their first show on October 21, 1988, at the Phantasy Theater in Lakewood, Ohio with the following six-song setlist: “Sanctified,” “Maybe Just Once,” “The Only Time,” “That’s What I Get,” “Ringfinger,” and “Down in it.”

Upward Spiral

By 1988, Nine Inch Nails were signed to the now-defunct TVT Records and released their debut, Pretty Hate Machine, a year later, delivering NIN classics “Down in It,” “Something I Can Never Have,” and “Head Like a Hole.” The latter track, one Reznor initially spewed out in 15 minutes and thought nothing of at first, was a breakthrough track for the band, peaking at No. 9 on the Billboard Bubbling Under Hot 100 chart. 

“I wrote it at the last minute as a throwaway,” said Reznor of the band’s hit. “The rest of ‘Pretty Hate Machine’ was already written, and we’d revised everything else about nine times. Up until then, songwriting had been a meticulous and agonizing process, but this took me 15 minutes in my bedroom.”

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In 1994, the band’s second release, Downward Spiral, shot to No. 2 on the Billboard 200 with hits “Closer” and the closing track, “Hurt,” which was later covered by Johnny Cash on his 2002 album American IV: The Man Comes Around, released a year before his death.

Atticus Ross

Throughout the ‘90s and into the’00s and 2010s, NIN has had several lineup shifts around Reznor, and has released 11 albums, including the two-part Ghosts V: Together and Ghosts VI: Locusts in 2020.

Following the addition of Atticus Ross in 2016, who joined in time for the band’s Not the Actual Events EP, he and Reznor have continued to concoct a new chapter of NIN. 

Together, the songwriting and production duo have earned 23 Oscar nominations, along with winning the Academy Award for Best Original Score for the 2020 Pixar animated film Soul, and a Grammy Award for Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media for the 2012 film The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

In 2019, Reznor and Ross also picked up an Emmy for their work on HBO’s Watchmen, putting them on track for an EGOT (winners of an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony award) and were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame as part of Nine Inch Nails in 2020.

Photo by R. Diamond/Getty Images for VetsAid 2022