Nine Inch Nails – As Alive As You Need Me to Be

A new song for a film franchise that’s been around even longer than all of today’s acts…

[Video]
[5.92]

Claire Biddles: Some of my favourite Nine Inch Nails singles that never were are pop songs that Trent and Atticus sneak onto the end of film scores — so I’m thrilled that they’ve actually formalised this tendency and released one as an actual proper Nine Inch Nails single. And it’s good! Even if its melodic progression, electronic squelches and lyrics about filling up holes inside of you etc are standard issue NIN, they’re still fun, and the deconstruction in the final minute reminds me of the incredible section of their recent shows where they were joined by Boys Noize. I’m hoping for more sickness to counteract the slickness on the album, even though Trent fucking owes me for having to care about a Tron sequel (?) soundtrack in big 2025.
[7]

Taylor Alatorre: Sometimes you just gotta step up and do the obvious thing, simply because you’re in a better position to do it. and do it right, than anyone else. Here, that looks like Reznor and Ross, by now more than secure in their Hollywood auteur laurels, deciding to score the new Tron film under the band name that will outlive their birth ones. They pen some slithery abstractions about the topic du jour, artificial intelligence, dressing it in the pulpy biomechanical tropes that are the most familiar to casual filmgoers. “It’s eating up all the remaining doubt” is the one novel insight here, but even just one is going above and beyond for this setting. And what better to accompany such lyrics than a digital remaster of the aggro-Depeche Mode stylings of Pretty Hate Machine, one that kicks the synthwave scene in its ass by evoking the stop-start glitchiness of the BBS era rather than its imagined sleekness? Nine Inch Nails as some Disney executive’s idea of scary dystopian robot music may be a bit daft, as was the notion of Daft Punk as futuristic cyber-utopia music. But there is an art to understanding the assignment, and NIN lean into their popular image in a way that scans as confident rather than debasing.
[8]

Andrew Karpan: The straightforwardness is, in its own way, evocative. An anthem about quiet quitting, collecting paychecks, rolled around in a singular aggressive eyeroll, it’s the dad punk rock ethos and it, unsurprisingly, mostly sounds like Depeche Mode. 
[5]

Tim de Reuse: I think what happened was that some suit was like, hey, let’s get Daft Punk back! And someone had to tell him they broke up. So he was like, okay, who’s kind of retro-flavored and was big in the early aughts? Trent Reznor? Sure, whatever. Can he use a vocoder? And so they asked Trent Reznor to use a vocoder, and they asked him very nicely to not sing about violence and power and sex. And Trent Reznor replied: okay, but that’s kind of my thing, though. But they said, please, no. So he sings about nothing in particular, but in the same kind of cadence he usually uses to sing about violence and sex. It’s not a very good Nine Inch Nails song, and it doesn’t really say “Tron,” either. But Trent Reznor got a paycheck out of it, and I do think he deserves to get paid.
[4]

Nortey Dowuona: You liar! That was Bandcamp anonymous mechanical engineer side project level! When they started 4 years ago! I need you to be a mechanical engineer side project that gets a writeup cuz Isabel requests we review it! And it’s the 4th that dropped this year!
[0]

Hannah Jocelyn: I wondered why this song had three credited mastering engineers (maybe it’s for the full album?) and three credited additional producers for a project pretty famous for being Trent Reznor’s baby first, give or take Alan Moulder and Flood. I was intrigued: Ian Kirkpatrick is one of the best pop producers we have, while BJ Burton is one of the best avant-garde/pop ones, and I was prepared to be disappointed. I hear it all! It’s obviously not too different from the usual, and I’m not even sure it’s as good as the best tracks on Mayhem, but I can hear Burton’s distortion and Ian Kirkpatrick’s restless percussion and they go a long way to help this stand on its own. With Serban Ghenea (his holiness etc) at the helm, Reznor’s rasp is so polished it kinda starts to sound like a certain other singer recruited for a Disney soundtrack, and that cracks me up. At the very least, it’s better than the borderline-campy stupidity of “Compress/Repress”, though I’d happily trade the talkbox for that song’s piano outro. 
[7]

Katherine St. Asaph: According to Trent Reznor, this song and/or the NIN TRON soundtrack commission is a “[riff on] artificial life infused with feelings and emotions” (groundbreaking). I guess the system prompt included Bon Jovi’s “It’s My Life.”
[5]

Jel Bugle: It was quite exciting until Trent started singing, and then it was just some stuff about life/angst/whatever NIN sing about. Would be better if Poppy was singing it. 
[5]

Ian Mathers: It’s what I think is a distorted orchestral sample that pushes this into an [8] for me (if this had been out for longer maybe I could find out what it was, but regardless it sounds great and is used very well). The lyrics probably work better divorced from the dumbass AI context of the movie, but that’s where I’m playing this on repeat, so it’s just as well.
[8]

TA Inskeep: Everything I wanted from a new NIN single in 2025, and everything that makes sense to soundtrack a new Tron film: it’s got that throb, it’s got that Reznor-ian sense of threat. The perfect synthesis of Reznor and Atticus Ross’s film scoring with Nine Inch Nails.
[9]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: It works as well as any Nine Inch Nails song does, but I can’t seem to get a handle on this one — I probably should be reviewing it not from a sun-dappled kitchen on a late summer morning but instead somewhere more fitting these vibes — a warehouse occupied by techno-anarchist cultists, the catacombs of Paris, or Ohio. 
[6]

Claire Davidson: I’m not expecting a Nine Inch Nails soundtrack cut released in 2025 to break the mold, and while “As Alive As You Need Me to Be” isn’t particularly surprising, it still adheres to a basic level of quality that’s hard to deny: menacing, buzzing synth tones careen and seethe throughout the mix, and Trent Reznor delivers some real intensity on his yelping hook, begging for reprieve from a nebulous entity determined to drain him of his life force. I do think the presence of vocoders on this track, while appropriately futuristic for a Tron movie, does more harm than good in cementing the song’s actual stakes: not only do they dull the momentum of the pre-chorus, they render the post-chorus urgency less dynamic, too, which is all the more noticeable in the absence of a bridge. Still, the song is good enough that I feel compelled to lament its presence in the latest Jared Leto vehicle—as if our news cycle didn’t feature enough sexual predators already.
[7]