LOS ANGELES — Trent Reznor was not happy. Sitting ramrod straight, dressed in a black T-shirt and black shorts, he was staring with grim concentration as his band, Nine Inch Nails, worked through their set in a full-scale production rehearsal at the Los Angeles Sports Arena. Smoke, strobe lights and video screens on wheels restlessly reconfigured themselves as the band performed, without Mr. Reznor’s lead vocals and instruments. Through song after song, his glare and scowl barely wavered; he’d look away only to tap notes into his laptop. After the band ran through the full set, he convened the musicians and technicians in a back room, well away from a visiting journalist.

“I don’t like having to yell at people,” he said the next day. “But I was letting them know the severity of the situation.” A lot had to shape up, and very soon.

In the course of a daylong tech rehearsal, some of it would. Powerful stage lights would no longer wash out video screens; the speed and density of interactive displays featuring cascades of virtual particles would be adjusted; the “chaos” and “turbulence” Mr. Reznor and his art director, Rob Sheridan, wanted to arise in each song would be calibrated to their specifications.

In 10 days Nine Inch Nails would be on tour for the first time since 2009, when Mr. Reznor had his band “disappear for a while,” as he wrote on the band’s Web site. “Hesitation Marks” (Columbia), a new Nine Inch Nails album that sounds radically different from the guitar-driven blasts of aggression that the band released before the hiatus, is due for release on Sept. 3.