You're listening to Song Exploder,
where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made.
I'm Rishikesh Hirway.
Trent Reznor started Nine Inch Nails in 1988.
He released eight albums, sold over 20 million records,
won two Grammys, and was nominated for 11 more.
In 2010, Trent Reznor and his longtime collaborator Atticus Ross scored the film The Social Network,
and they won an Oscar for it.
A few years later, in 2016, Atticus Ross joined Nine Inch Nails as an official member.
Now, as a duo, their most recent release is Add Violence, an EP.
And in this episode, Trent and Atticus break down a song from it called The Lovers.
I am Trent Reznor.
A year and a half ago, we've decided that the next major Nine Inch Nails work,
rather than one kind of lengthy album, we'd split it up into EPs,
and the plan is three, the first of which was not the actual events,
very kind of aggressive return to guitars and confrontational type of music.
And it was fun.
It was exciting.
The current EP, Add Violence, which The Lovers is from,
when we started that out, it was less defined what it was going to be.