We are just a few days away from receiving the next installment of a planned trilogy of EPs from industrial rock legends Nine Inch Nails. Today, Trent Reznor took to social media to share a brand new track from the group’s upcoming release Add Violence, a slow burner of a song called “This Isn’t The Place.”
As opposed to the last song that Reznor unveiled, the savage “Less Than,” this new composition carries a decidedly more elegiac feel. The music starts from dead silence and swells outward over the span of several minutes, before Reznor finally interjects with a tender vocal midway through, singing about someone he appears to have lost. “If you see my friend / I thought I would again / A single thin, straight line / I thought we had more time.”
In a recent interview with Zane Lowe on Beats 1, Reznor opened up about his ongoing EP trilogy. “I’ll tell you the blueprint of this suite of records has been starting with the kind of script — the lyrical construct, the world that they sit in,” he said. “And then, really following inspiration in the studio to find out musically kind of feels inspiring at that time. When we did Not the Actual Events we were really seduced by the violence of it. The kind of throwing Hesitation Marks out the window and being unafraid to explore approaches we have in the past with the kind of, you know, punch in the face feel to it.”
As for the final installment in the series? “I have no idea what the last part of this will be. I know lyrically where it goes, but I don’t know what it’s going to sound like yet.”
You can check out “This Isn’t The Place” in the video above.
