"Essentially I wrote the counteract to a movie that doesn't exist."

Trent Reznor of NIN is releasing a new album, Year Zero, in April. This makes Jen happy.

I found this out from an annoying article in Rolling Stone that had me sputtering my Sleepy Time tea and agonizing over the state of rock journalism.

Then I got over it, removed the annoying parts and left the Reznor quotes.
"With Teeth was me kind of wondering if I could still even do this. I've got my confidence back. I feel stronger about what I have to say as an artist and I feel a lot less concerned about what people think about it. My best work is ahead of me."

"Emo screamo! If I happen to accidentally turn the radio on, I literally can't tell the difference between one of 20 bands. Either I'm getting old, which is a fact, or I'm turning into my dad! I wonder about the person that's in a band, the young kid who just got signed or is trying to get signed - why is he doing it? Is he trying to change the world and do something different and express himself or is it because they want to fuck Paris Hilton and be photographed outside trendy restaurants?"

A better bit of writing can be found in Kerrang!

Your last album took six years. We've only had to wait 18 months for this one.

Trent Reznor (vocals): "It's been pretty interesting, I'm probably as surprised as some fans are (laughs). But really it's just a matter of discipline. When I was on the last tour, to keep myself busy I was just really hunkered down and was working on music the whole time, so this kept me in a creative mode and when I finished the tour I felt like I wasn't tired and wanted to keep at it."

Is there anyone else playing on the album?

"It's all me, mostly recorded in hotel rooms around the world on laptops. There maybe some surprise vocalists that pop up here and there - although I don't want to say who since the final mix hasn't been determined yet, and Josh Freese is playing the drums on one song, but it's not like a big guest star-type record. It feels a bit more focused in a certain direction than 'With Teeth' did."

What's the concept?

"I'm trying to avoid getting too detailed about this but I will tell you that this is a concept record, and it's part of a bigger picture of a number of things I'm working on. Essentially I wrote the soundtrack to a movie that doesn't exist. This album is a bit more electronic and I'd say rhyme plays a bigger element in it than in the past and it's veering away from concern about song structure and getting played on the radio."

Are you talking about some kind of multimedia event?

"My goal is that the music can be interpreted with the richest context. So what I'm immersed in is a way to achieve that. Now that albums have gone from 12 inches of real estate with artwork and a whole aesthetic, to CDs, which are ugly and disposable, to nowadays just being a file on a computer, it's led me to putting a lot of thought in to ways to present music that still makes it feel important and that has depth and purpose."

Will it be a heavy album?

"It's not heavy in any kind of metal type sense, I'd say a big inspiration sonically would be early Public Enemy records, a collage of sound type of thing, not heavy in a metal guitar kind of way."

On 'The Downward Spiral' and 'The Fragile' you blended together an extreme amount of disparate sounds and layers - is this moving further in that direction?

"Well, Alan Moulder (long-time collaborator) was stunned when he first heard it. Normally a Pro-Tools session has a lot of tracks and this time he was like, 'You're kidding me, it's only this much stuff?' The end result has a bit of racket to it. It's much more improvisational, less refined. With this record, I feel a lot less concerned about what people think about it - especially the dying record industry. I couldn't care less about that right now."