Nine Inch Nails appeared on BBC Music 6 today in promotion of two upcoming London shows - they play Meltdown festival on June 22nd, and a newly announced show June 24th at London's Royal Albert Hall. Near the end of the interview, host Tom Ravenscroft asked for a progress report on the band's third and final installment in their EP trilogy. Reznor revealed that they were still completing work on the EP but it will be out before the shows take place in June. According to Reznor, the final EP took a bit longer than originally planned due to an unexpected creative delay:
"We started out with a pretty rigid concept of what the three EPs were going to be, having not written them all, but had a kind of blueprint for the trajectory and the sound. And then as we finished the last one, Add Violence, and started work on what we thought was going to be the third EP, we found ourselves - it felt too predictable. It felt like what we originally -- the map we'd kind of drawn out, the plot line -- felt like we were forcing things musically and storytelling-wise, just the whole trajectory.
We thought it was a brief phase and we kept at it and it still inherently felt wrong, so we -- the reason it's been a little bit delayed, is it took us awhile to, for what has become the third EP, to reveal itself to us. It was kind of a left turn, a surprise, it took us awhile to wrap our heads around it, but we're in the process of finishing that right now and that should be out before these shows take place."
Reznor also briefly talked about playing Meltdown, which is being curated by Robert Smith this year:
"We absolutely love The Cure and Robert Smith. I've been a lifelong fan. To be asked (to play), it didn't take much thought on our part."
Stream the full interview with Nine Inch Nails here (begins ~ 1:46:30).
Published March 15th, 2018