Before Trent Reznor’s life as an Oscar-winning film composer, he brought industrial rock to the mainstream with his band Nine Inch Nails. He studied piano as a child and studied computer engineering in college. These two technologies, the piano and the computer, have been Reznor’s tools for escaping alienation.
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Underneath the angst and power of Nine Inch Nails lurked a gift for composition and melody. There were other industrial rock bands around at the time. But Nine Inch Nails wrote songs you could sing. The NIN song “Closer” has one of the most openly obscene lyrics of any popular song. It’s also infectiously catchy. If you’ve ever wondered what Bach would have sounded like with a Moog synthesizer, now you know.
But NIN always sounded cinematic. Even within shorter songs, the music possessed strong themes and movements. It transported listeners to other realities. The chief role of the soundtrack is elevation. Transporting the viewer to a new world. One where the characters on screen look, sound, and feel like real people. Music is a crucial part of the experience. Great music elevates a film just as bad music can ruin it.
Trent Reznor is responsible for some of the most original and moving film scores of our time. Reznor, like Jonny Greenwood from Radiohead, landed a second act as a film composer. See Trent Reznor’s top five film scores below.
5. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011)
The soundtrack opens with Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross, and Karen O from Yeah Yeah Yeahs covering Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song” and it is awesome, literally. Electronic ambient music is familiar territory for Reznor. But this score, at times, is claustrophobic. The recording is thick with tension and is perfectly suited to the film’s bleakness. Investigating a 40-year-old murder mystery will lead to many dead-end leads. Reznor shapes the mystery thriller with intrigue, uncomfortable low-life motives, and sinister darkness.
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4. Mank (2020)
Reznor is known as a forward-thinking musician. While many artists re-create music from the past, he eschews tradition. Director David Fincher asked Reznor to look back to the film’s time period. In response, Reznor created an Old Hollywood orchestral score. He traveled back to 1940s jazz using period-correct instruments. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the orchestral musicians had to record separately from home. He abandoned his usual preference for synthesizers and industrial sounds. Mank is the story of Herman J. Mankiewicz writing the screenplay for Citizen Kane. On a piece called “A Fool’s Paradise,” Reznor uses a manual typewriter as a rhythmic instrument inside a jazz ensemble.
3. Gone Girl (2014)
Based on the novel of the same name, Gone Girl pulls the curtain back to reveal something sinister hiding behind the façade of a perfect marriage. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross use industrial textures and ambient soundscapes to move between dark realities and optimism. There are several moments in the score when things feel lost. Loss of control. Loss of a loved one. Loss of the person you thought you knew. Creeping bells and dissonant synthesizers are Reznor’s tools of illusion. What you think you know isn’t true. Reznor searches for the moment when curiosity becomes apathy. The music is unsettling and sounds as unreliable as the couple narrating the story.
2. Soul (2020)
The soundtrack to Soul was created by Jon Batiste, Trent Reznor, and Atticus Ross. Batiste covers the Blue Note-inspired jazz pieces while Reznor and Ross handle the ethereal side of the film’s score. Using moving synthesizers, their compositions are an earth-to-heaven lift. It’s both soul meets body and soul leaving the body.
Reznor is known for his dark side. With Soul, he’s moving toward the light. The score is optimistic. It takes you to outer space and then right back down on the sidewalk of a dense city street. While Batiste plays inside a New York City jazz club, Reznor is zooming out, looking down from some other realm, searching for identity and meaning. Soul won the Oscar and a Golden Globe Award for Best Original Score.
1. The Social Network (2010)
For Trent Reznor’s first film score, he uses space and found-sounds as compositional tools. He seeks tension in the sound of an air conditioner or some other household appliance. The droning noise is overlayed with sparse piano. Reznor and his collaborator Atticus Ross created ambient soundscapes and electronic tension perfect for a film about the founding of Facebook.
Like Reznor’s past work with Nine Inch Nails, there’s an overarching sense of dystopia to the score. It’s perfect for the unknown realties of speeding technology changing the way humans communicate on a massive scale. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg couldn’t have imagined creating a tool of disinformation that threatens global democracies and threatens the very fabric of society. Reznor’s score is the tension of impending doom. It’s also the moment you realize it’s too late to turn back. The Social Network won an Oscar and a Golden Globe Award for Best Original Score.
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