Desire, Noise, Salvation. NIN Are Still Alive — As Alive As You Need Me To Be
Industrial ghosts, red haze, and a voice that still cuts like a kiss
Nine Inch Nails were the sexiest band of the Nineties. Closer was a carnal, pulsating anthem that begged you to move your hips and lose control. With the new video As Alive As You Need Me To Be, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross remind us why that title still belongs to them.
The track comes from the soundtrack to Tron: Ares, yet another Disney reboot. On paper, it might sound like a cold commission, but as soon as the pounding kick drum and industrial bass kick in, you’re jolted in your seat as if the strobe lights had just flared on. And then there’s Reznor’s voice: a fevered whisper, a kiss sung into your ear, something you’d want beside you every night.
The way it makes me feel, infection
It’s almost like a tongue on the back of my neck
The video, directed by Maxime Quoilin, amplifies that sensation: black and red flickering like interference, images like worn-out tape, bodies writhing to break free from the static. It’s a “dirty” aesthetic that recalls the rawness of the Closer video — harsh lighting, crucifixes, cockroaches — and today feels like a breath of relief, far removed from the glossy polish of most mainstream clips.
Musically, the track is pure NIN (released in July 2025), produced with Boys Noize: razor-sharp electronics, playful vocoder experiments, and Reznor’s existential croon (“Give me something to believe in”). It’s a sound that fuses steel and flesh, mechanics and fever, as if intimacy itself were a virus.
Meanwhile, Nine Inch Nails have carried this same spirit back onstage with the Peel It Back 2025 tour: twenty songs per setlist, from classics like Wish, Closer, and Hurt to new material. The concerts have been incendiary, with flashes of surreal levity: in Philadelphia, a rogue Santa Claus staged a crowd-surf, drawing a rare laugh from Reznor.
The sound of Tron: Ares has been described as “precise and at times unpleasant.” But that’s exactly where NIN remain true to themselves: turning disturbance into emotion, distortion into a physical experience. As Alive As You Need Me To Be is the manifesto of a return that looks to the future but remains deeply human, carnal, irresistible.