• Serial killer. Let's talk about Watchmen
  • Damon Lindelof. "White supremacism is not going anywhere"

Tic tac, tic tac. It has been necessary that the clock of the Apocalypse arrived at midnight for the mass public to synchronize its existence with that of Trent Reznor , a circumstance so unlikely just a few years ago that a giant octopus suddenly appeared in the center of New York. However, here we have it: the icon of industrial rock for two generations stars in one of the most surprising reinventions of the decade that is now ending, and also puts a soundtrack to the series of the year: Watchmen .

How has the leader of Nine Inch Nails (NIN) ended up being mentioned in corridors in front of the coffee machine, tucked even as if his career was the highway of a Billboard superstar and not the dark and meandering road he almost derailed for the bad life? What is left of the guy with a leather jacket and a tight T-shirt - all black - who wanted to convince us that the key to our time was in the noise? Is the new Midas of streaming music really the old success maker of Marilyn Manson ?

The answer is in the nine chapters of the fiction created for HBO by Damon Lindelof ( Lost and The Leftovers ). And to be quite honest, also in the material that the American composer and producer (Mercer, Pennsylvania, 54 years) has been publishing since he and his creative buddy Atticus Ross put their hands on Oscar and the Golden Globe for the atmosphere minimalist social network (2010). Material, that of recent years, basically composed to accompany other people's images: the documentary Before it is late (2016) the films Lost (2014) and Blind (2018) or the series The Vietnam War (2017).

Now Watchmen projects a Reznor up to sidereal heights with the lesson well learned, again with Ross at his side on the mixer and more attentive than ever to the blissful zeitgeist . In an era brimming with epic tales and grandeur, the Pretty Hate Machine architect dusts the eighties synthesizers to go back to their own origins ; in a moment of transition in which the rebound of a nut against the ground says more of us as civilization than any arpeggio of classical music, do not forget the factory factory squeaks to which so much party, for example, has managed to get them Hildur Guðnadóttir ( Chernobyl ). And between one thing and the other, the same bitterly reinterprets the Life on Mars of Bowie - the British, absolute fan, compared the impact of NIN with that of The Velvet Underground - which turns a slaughter of cows into an electronic delicatessen only suitable for bradycardic.

Reznor explained a few days ago in Rolling Stone that he was himself, a reader at the time of the legendary comic from which the plot starts, who volunteered directly to put Watchmen's environmental background. «We arrived without having any idea what Damon Lindelof's plan was. We sat in a preliminary meeting with the producers and he talked about the argument in a 10-minute monologue. Atticus Ross and we looked at each other as if to say: 'Ok, we got lost in the first 15 seconds ' ».

Given the result, anyone would say it, although it is not necessary to be a nuclear physicist to see that the structuring of the series at different levels was ideal for the way of creating an artist who was already honored by Miley Cyrus in the fifth installment of Black Mirror ( 2019) and David Lynch in the famous eighth episode of Twin Peaks: The return (2017).

Now that the first season? of the hooded watchers has made the closing, the question is what can we expect from the good of Trent. Those who wait for new material from NIN should know that this does not fit into their short-term plans, and that the Bad Witch album (2018) may be the only thing that can be put in their ears in quite some time.

With the band always greased to make money on the trantran with their performances at the big festivals - it was at Mad Cool 2018 and could be in the next edition of Primavera Sound, the 20th anniversary, of not having intervened the next David Fincher movie- , Reznor seems definitely more focused on competing with the aforementioned Guðnadóttir and Max Richter for the throne that John Williams, James Horner and Hans Zimmer will soon be free.

For now, the launch of Pixar next summer has come out of his hands: Soul . Who would have told the dark knight 30 years ago.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

Know more

  • HBO
  • Series
  • comic
  • media

PublicAlmudena Ariza, new director of News of RTVE

RadioJuanma Castaño on Manu Carreño: "I have no deal. There is a division that has never healed"

TelevisiónAlmudena Ariza resigns his appointment as new Director of TVE News