At the end of the cold, nightmarish “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” is a How to Destroy Angels cover of Bryan Ferry’s “Is Your Love Strong Enough?“. It was Fincher’s idea. I don’t think it worked at all.
This is largely because I’m not 100% sure Hot To Destroy Angels works, period. I’ve always found Maandig’s voice to be too honeyed for the darker, industrial tones of Reznor’s more-rhythmic songcrafting. “Strong Enough,” granted, isn’t the group’s song, but it further reveals how out-of-water a sugar-malaise voice can be.
But some good news to this hater: Reznor won’t only be working on a new HtDA album this year. He’s writing for some new Nine Inch Nails action, too.
“I’m going to be writing for Nine Inch Nails this year,” Reznor told Billboard this week. “My voice as a songwriter feels like it needs to speak up or at least work out a little bit to not atrophy. I think I have something to say that feels unique to who I am right now, and that’s when it tells me it’s time to do something.”
The band has been on hiatus since 2009, as Reznor and collaborator Atticus Ross went and earned some nods and wins for their scores for films “The Social Network” and “Dragon Tattoo.” The music he’s written recently has usually fallen into those efforts or with How to Destory Angels, but now he’s crafting music for NIN to scratch an itch.
“At the moment [the songs are] going to live in the Nine Inch Nails column, for a few reasons. I enjoy the challenge of moving that kind of brand forward, that identity, shaping it to who I am now instead of who I was a few years ago when I last left off,” he said, though offering that at may be a minute. “It’s all kind of hypothetical right now. When I sit down with a notebook and a little mini-recorder is when my bluff will be called, and then it might not happen at all.”
Reznor and Ross are up for a Golden Globe award this weekend for “Dragon Tattoo’s” original score. Of it, Reznor said: “I don’t think it’s the kind of score you leave humming the love theme from ‘…Dragon Tattoo’ or anything. We purposely went in to make the type of score that disappeared into the frames and felt like a part of the set… but not announcing itself as ‘Look how flashy this is!’ We were really aiming for something that was more in the woodwork and were very pleased with how it came out and, again, are so astonished and so flattered it’s getting noticed.”
How to Destroy Angels are expected to release their first full-length this year; they released a debut EP in 2010.