You could trace this little curio’s origins back to 2024, when Reznor and Ross composed the score for the film Challengers. The pair commissioned a mixed (and remixed) version of their music from Ridha, who hadn’t enjoyed much clout since the blog house era, and was, by his own account, surprised to get the call. Ridha’s thumping mixtape version of the Challengers OST was a clearly superior product to the standard score album—a format that rarely works as a coherent listening experience, and that Reznor has been trying to improve on since Oliver Stone hired him to curate and edit the Natural Born Killers soundtrack. (Remember when soundtracks felt like mixtapes with dialog from the movie woven in? That was mostly Trent’s idea.) Despite Reznor and Ross’ imaginative score, Challengers failed to get the Oscar or Golden Globe nods of their other film projects. It did, however, have the more interesting result of making Ridha a rare new addition to the Nine Inch Nails family.
The idea of Nine Inch Nails as a band has always been something of a conceit. In early interviews, Reznor said outright he simply preferred doing everything himself to “wasting time” working with others who didn’t share his vision (an approach he shared with Prince, one of his key influences). He established a relatively consistent lineup for his touring band through the ’90s and ’00s, some of whom also helped out on his albums, and who he always treated in interviews not as hired guns but as proper members of Nine Inch Nails. The lineup changed incrementally over the years. Then, in 2016, after teaming up on a few film scores, Ross became the first official second member of Nine Inch Nails. And then, in 2024, came Boys Noize.
Stylistically, Boys Noize has left the clearest mark of anyone who has shuffled in and out of NIN’s roster. Ross’ impact is mostly under the hood. In an interview with Rick Rubin, Reznor explained that, for instance, Ross would finish and send off something they’d been working on while Reznor took time off with his family—a change in creative process that, while hard to audibly discern, is fairly radical for a longtime one-man band whose single member brought himself to the brink sweating every last detail of every project.
Ridha’s impact is harder to miss. Simply put, he brings the rave. On the Peel It Back tour, he DJ’d as the opening act. In an inspired sleight of hand, his set would finish on a crescendo that segued straight into a curtain drop, revealing Reznor alone on a small stage in the middle of the crowd, stunning an audience suddenly meters away from a man they worshipped, who they assumed would appear on the distant mainstage after the 20-something-minute break that usually follows the opener.
This second stage was home to drastic reimaginings of Nine Inch Nails’ music, served two ways. First, you got Unplugged-in-New-York style ballads, with just the piano and Reznor singing gently, even on typically heavy songs (like, in the case of the Berlin show, “Ruiner”). Then, after a barrage of full-blown rock-band backed rippers on the big stage (”March of the Pigs,” “Wish,” “Head Like a Hole,” “The Perfect Drug,” etc.), the action moved back to the second stage, this time for what could loosely be described as a series of synth pop or club versions of the band’s songs. No drums, no guitars, just racks of synths and drum machines, manned by Reznor, Ross, and Ridha.
