Nine Inch Nails’ first proper new song in five years, “As Alive As You Need Me To Be,” has emerged ahead of the fall release of TRON: Ares, for which the Trent Reznor-led group is supplying the soundtrack. The latter is due Sept. 19 from Interscope, with the third film in the TRON franchise hitting theaters on Oct. 10.
The propulsive “As Alive As You Need Me To Be” burbles with dance floor menace and the revving sound of the futuristic motorcycles frequently seen in TRON‘s in-film racing sequences. The track was produced by Reznor and longtime collaborator Atticus Ross in tandem with Boyz Noize, Ian Kirkpatrick, BJ Burton and Hudson Mohawke.
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In all, NIN’s TRON: Ares soundtrack sports more than 70 minutes of new music from the group, whose last new albums were the simultaneous 2020 releases Ghosts V: Together and Ghosts VI: Locusts. “I’ll give a few spoilers: there’s not one second of orchestra in our score,” Reznor recently told Empire. “It sounds precise and unpleasant at times. It’s not an atonal, punishing score, but we spent a lot of time thinking about the undertones of what’s happening in the story. The concept of artificial life infused with feelings and emotions and a sense of questioning their purpose and their replaceability, their lack of soul, in some ways. We kind of riffed on that.”
The movie stars Jared Leto, Jeff Bridges, Greta Lee and Evan Peters in the follow-up to 2010’s Tron: Legacy, itself a long-in-the-works sequel to the classic 1982 original film. Daft Punk’s score for Tron: Legacy was a massive hit, reaching No. 4 on the Billboard 200 and selling more than a million copies in the United States, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. Wendy Carlos penned the score for the original movie.
Nine Inch Nails’ first North American tour in three years will get underway Aug. 6 in Oakland, Ca. Reznor and Ross are also hosting the first Future Ruins festival, which will be held Nov. 8 at the Los Angeles Equestrian Center and feature performances by acclaimed film and TV music colleagues such as John Carpenter (Halloween, They Live, The Thing), Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein (Stranger Things, Lost in the Night), Devo’s Mark Mothersbaugh (The Life Aquatic, The Royal Tenenbaums, Rushmore) and Questlove presenting the score works of Curtis Mayfield.
Here is the track list for TRON: Ares
Init
Forked Reality
As Alive as You Need Me to Be
Echoes
This Changes Everything
In the Image Of
I Know You Can Feel It
Permanence
Infiltrator
100% Expendable
Still Remains
Who Wants to Live Forever?
Building Better Worlds
Target Identified
Daemonize
Empathetic Response
What Have You Done?
A Question of Trust
Ghost in the Machine
No Going Back
Nemesis
New Directive
Out in the World
Shadow Over Me
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