TRON: ARES (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) by NINE INCH NAILS - Review

This record doesn’t ease you in. It doesn’t even open like an album. It convulses, spits, and then clamps its jaws around your skull. The first sound feels less like music and more like your nervous system being rewired with live current. It grabs your spine, rattles your teeth, and drags you headfirst into a black chamber where light is synthetic and air tastes like burnt wires.

Nine Inch Nails did not write a score. They built a furnace. Daft Punk once gave the Grid a neon cathedral, chrome and champagne fizz. Reznor and Ross burn it all down. What rises from the ashes is a ruin, lit by dying fluorescents, humming with distorted electricity. The drums slam like blunt objects. Synths shriek like bent steel. Basslines hit like concussions. Every sound is impact, collision, machinery folding in on itself.

And yet, out of that chaos, a piano appears. Thin, trembling, too human for this place. It flickers like a candle in a storm, pulling you close, making you believe in grace for a moment. But the beauty never survives. It’s always consumed, drowned, buried alive in static. Hope is bait, and you learn quickly not to trust it.

As the soundtrack deepens, you stop hearing it as music. It seeps under the skin, becomes sensation, symptom, infestation. A jitter in the fingers, a pounding behind the eyes, a vibration in the gut. This is less accompaniment than possession. Themes never return, melodies never resolve. Each track is a new wound.

The whole work moves like sickness. There are no clean arcs, no hummable refrains. Just fragments, collisions, hints of something radiant that vanish before you can hold them. Critics call it desperate. It feels more like ritual, a deliberate stripping away of comfort until only nerves remain.

And that is where its power lives. In the tension between brutality and beauty, in the fragility that hurts more because it’s fleeting. Every wave of distortion, every slab of noise, grinds away another layer until you’re raw. The music doesn’t want to entertain you. It wants to alter you.

When the final sound dies, silence lands heavy, obscene. You feel marked, bruised, haunted. You’ve been through a gauntlet and you don’t leave whistling a theme. You leave with scars buzzing under the skin.

Tron: Ares by Nine Inch Nails is not a soundtrack. It’s a detonation, a scar carved in real time. It is ritual and execution dressed as cinema. The Grid has never sounded so alive, or so eager to devour you whole.