Nine Inch Nails Is For The Girls
Go with me here for a sec.
WHY THEY’RE HERE: They have a way bigger queer fanbase, and influence on music by LGBTQI+ folks, than you probably realize
WHAT’S THE VIBE: Nihilist, disturbed, anti-capitalist
START HERE BUT ALSO KEEP READING: “March of the Pigs,” “Closer,” “Head Like a Hole”
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Balls are flying. Rackets are swinging. Club music is blaring. Wait — club music is blaring. After all this tennis and sexual tension with homoerotic undertones, you’re thinking, What gay techno artist did they hire to score this film? And then you Google it and find out that it wasn’t a queer musician who soundtracked Challengers — it was Trent fucking Reznor and his longtime collaborator Atticus Ross.
Yes, Trent Reznor, the same Trent Reznor who many folks my age (i.e. born in the early 1990s) might’ve first learned about when his band Nine Inch Nails was returning in the mid-aughts with their fourth album, With Teeth. The same Trent Reznor whose masculinity has historically preceded him in his often deeply aggro industrial rock music. The same Trent Reznor whose visual aesthetic is often (not always, we’ll get to this) black leather jackets, black t-shirts, and a clean-cut, traditionally American City Man™ aesthetic. Yes, the same guy whose most famous song is the one on which the chorus goes “I wanna fuck you like an animal.” Trent Reznor exudes intensely masculine energy on so many levels, the polar opposite of the femininity associated with most pop stars.
And yet, the queers love him. Myself included.
Nothing I said in the opening graf of this newsletter spoils much about Challengers, but the rest of this paragraph will: Challengers is about two tennis-player dudes lusting after Zendaya’s character but also kind of after each other. It’s quintessentially queerbait in that all the guy-on-guy action (wow, I really just used that phrase, yikes) happens in the first act and nothing really comes of it thereafter. Great movie, but not because Josh O'Connor and Mike Faist get down to business. Honestly, the gayest thing about it is the score, which I truly thought I’d learn was created by, like…well, one of the other dozens of straight-men producers who help pop stars step into their “I’ve been to Berghain” eras. I may have more to say in a future newsletter on what it means that straight-men producers dominate this sound, but in any case, Trent Reznor really understands how to make music that evokes certain spaces that queers love. No wonder we embrace him so much.
And yet, we actually don’t embrace him that much quite yet, hence me writing this newsletter. The Nine Inch Nails sound isn’t exactly what comes to mind when you think of what the queers are listening to. Yes, Charli XCX has brought more abrasive electronic sounds into the mainstream, but even “Sympathy is a knife” is a far cry from the thrashing of NIN’s “Wish.” NIN’s rightfully beloved “Head Like a Hole,” though a staple of my workout playlist, isn’t quite Top 40 music, though it did technically reach #109 in 1990 — as in, just nine spots shy of the Billboard Hot 100 — according to the track’s Wikipedia page. Another thing I learned from said page: A version of the song is used in the Black Mirror episode featuring Miley Cyrus, which I somehow still have not yet seen despite loving that show.
This segues nicely into my next point: You know who loves Trent Reznor? The femme and/or queer pop stars who comprise a large chunk of LGBTQI+ music fans’ listening. Lady Gaga has said that NIN inspired Mayhem’s lead single and opening track, “Disease” (read my Mayhem review!), and I kind of hear it. Gaga loves NIN’s “Closer” so much (the “fuck you like an animal” song, which I also love) that she played it when she was a guest on, ew, Howard Stern’s SiriusXM radio show this year and said about Reznor that she “black[s] out every time I’m in his presence.”
Then, there’s Halsey, the misunderstood New Jersey pop figure who’s had diminishing Top 40 success since the late 2010s but who dropped their best album in 2021. On If I Can't Have Love, I Want Power — you guessed it — Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross were their co-producers and co-writers. Whereas some pop musicians with the resources of Halsey’s label, Capitol, might bring in every co-producer and co-writer under the sun — Beyoncé is the obvious example, but as per SZA’s SOS credits, she does this too — they chose to work only with two people across 13 of their best songs.
As for queer AFAB folx in the indie pop world, Karin Dreijer, best known for writing and producing haunting electronic pop under the name Fever Ray, brought in Ross and Atticus to co-produce “Even It Out,” my favorite song from their 2023 album Radical Romantics. For the most part, Dreijer’s only other collaborator on the album is their brother Olof Dreijer, their former bandmate in the legendary experimental electronic duo The Knife, whose “Full of Fire” is one of my favorite songs ever recorded. And, of course, in my one-year retrospective on St. Vincent’s All Born Screaming, I wrote about the obvious St. Vincent-NIN connection. A handful of queer pop-music visionaries folks know Trent Reznor is their go-to for bangers (Nine Inch Nails’ "34 Ghosts IV" is sampled extensively in Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road”), and I expect even more LGBTQI+ pop icons will realize this soon.
Reznor’s score work is equally important to his place in the queer canon, and almost as if to pin the tail right on the gay donkey, the other 2024 film he scored besides Challengers is literally called Queer. Admittedly, it’s also a movie by Luca Guadagnino, the queer director who also helmed Challengers and had his breakout in 2017 with the very, very gay Call Me By Your Name, a movie I’m unafraid to go on record as absolutely hating. Sorry y’all. In any case, although Guadagnino has made a whole-ass career out of casting straight people in gay roles (I’ve heard the argument from at least one queer filmmaker I’ve met in real life that, if a straight person is truly the best fit for the role, they would rather cast that person), the fact that he sees Reznor as best suited for the task of evoking queerness via music signals that Reznor may well be For The Girls.
And you know what? So do the dang outfits. No, not the ones I described at the outset of this newsletter. The one in the “March of the Pigs” video, for example. I mean, this man is really out here wearing tight leather jeans and mesh on his arms. Mesh on his arms. Apparently, Trent Reznor walked so that some rando at The Eagle could run. The shoulder-length hair is giving queer too — but, to be clear, I’m saying this all in jest, and one’s fashion and grooming choices do not completely or clearly dictate, suggest, or imply one’s sexuality or gender. I am, though, saying that Reznor’s appearance in this video suggests that he’s comfortable enough with his masculinity to dress in a way that, if a high-school-aged boy showed up at school like that, might get them homophobically and transphobically bullied. And, at least in that regard, he’s probably been an ally, if not an outright one, long before his work in queer music and film. At the very least, debuting with “Head Like a Hole” lets people know right away that you’re anti-capitalist, which is somewhere between a baby step and a gateway drug toward queer allyship.
But back to “Closer,” the one with the “I wanna fuck you like an animal” line that feels aggressively straight. Well…is it really? Tell me you don’t know several queers who are looking for someone to say exactly this line to them in a bedroom or a bathhouse. Yes, “Closer” is deeply masculine, deeply unsettling, deeply violent. But I could also see it being sexy for the right person in the right circumstances. And it’s not a song about taking advantage of someone or depriving them: The full chorus goes “I wanna fuck you like an animal / I wanna feel you from the inside / I wanna fuck you like an animal / My whole existence is flawed / You get me closer to god.” It’s a song about being so ready to exit life that only sexual ecstasy and the connection it brings with another person can save you. If that isn’t the kind of beautiful take on sex that feels more common in queer communities than among straight men, I don’t know what is. And then there’s this line from “The Only Time,” a deep cut from Nine Inch Nails’ debut album, 1989’s Pretty Hate Machine (which opens with “Head Like a Hole”): “Lay my hands on Heaven and the sun and the moon and the stars / While the devil wants to fuck me in the back of his car.” The devil? Fucking Trent Reznor instead of Trent Reznor fucking him? The queer overtones are unsubtle. Maybe this is where Lil Nas X’s Satan lapdance comes from.
In my review of Fusilier’s Ambush, I noted that the album’s opener and title track kind of maps perfectly onto NIN’s “March of the Pigs.” Some critics have compared Model/Actriz’s Pirouette to Nine Inch Nails with a queer pop twist. Shortly after I drafted my Fusilier review, a queer friend of mine reposted a viral Instagram reel about shaking your ass and nearly twerking to “Head Like a Hole” at the Nine Inch Nails live show. It’s clear that Reznor has cultivated a tremendous fanbase among queer musicians and non-musicians alike, influencing some of your faves while showing a strong respect for and understanding of queer motifs in his work outside NIN, and occasionally inside it too. I’m rendering it official: Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails are For The Girls.
Please read this article. The current presidential administration is looking into sending U.S. citizens to prisons in El Salvador that are generally understood to be torture camps. This is analogous to Nazi Germany, as are many actions over the last 10 years of U.S. presidential administrations and Congressional politics; when I walked along the thousands-feet-long timeline of Nazi Germany that’s on display outdoors at Berlin, Germany’s Holocaust museum, it mapped near-perfectly onto said period. We are in danger. What will you do to help the people take back their power?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Max Freedman launched the LGBTQ+ music newsletter Lavender Sound in January 2025 to create an online writing community by and for LGBTQ+ people about LGBTQ+ music. They also interview artists for The Creative Independent, which is their favorite website (they really want you to read their Jaboukie Young-White interview), and they’ve previously contributed music criticism to Pitchfork, Bandcamp Daily, and Paste. Their pronouns are whatever float your boat ⛴️💜
Yas! This all day.