Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross Win Golden Globe for Pixar’s ‘Soul’

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Over the past decade, Nine Inch Nails have gone from terrifying industrial rock powerhouse to award-winning cinematic tour de force. Ever since the band’s creative duo of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross won an Oscar in 2011 for their score of The Social Network, they’ve has been in high demand to create the music behind some of Hollywood’s most inspirational films. Now, NIN can add a new accolade to their list, having scored a Golden Globe for their work on Pixar’s Soul.

The duo, alongside musician Jon Batiste, won Best Original Score for Pixar’s film about a jazz musician who, after being sent to the afterlife, makes a frantic attempt to return to the land of the living. The team were up against Alexandre Desplat for The Midnight Sky, Ludwig Goränsson for Tenet, James Newton Howard for News of the World, and, weirdly enough, themselves for Mank.

Speaking to Heroic Hollywood last year, Reznor said, “Our first step is always to listen and really try to understand where the filmmakers are coming from: what they’re seeing, what they’re imagining,” Trent said of the creative process.

“We spent a lot of time discussing how you’re supposed to feel when you’re first exposed to the Soul world. Then we went back to our studio, which is filled with a variety of real, imagined and synthetic instruments, and spent the first chunk of time experimenting with different arrangements and different instruments and seeing what felt emotionally right to create the fabric of this world.

“We multitrack recorded them as if we were scoring with an orchestra. We came up with a few techniques over the years that take sounds that aren’t of this Earth necessarily, yet they feel warm and organic and natural.”

Congrats to Reznor, Ross, and Batiste on this momentous win! We’re excited to see what they’ve got in the works moving forward.

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Words by Chris Krovatin

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