He shakes his head. “It’s a humbling thing, having kids. One of my sons came to rehearsals, and now he says Daddy’s job is ‘go play loud music.'”That job, and Daddy’s relationship to it, is very different now. While Reznor takes pains to point out that he’d only ever said that Nine Inch Nails were taking a break from touring — the band had been on the road almost constantly from 2005 to 2009 — he does admit that his attitude about the project that made him rich and famous had profoundly shifted. “The main thing was that I didn’t want to be on an endless rock-band tour with Nine Inch Nails,” he says. “And I said that adamantly enough to force my hand at trying something new. It was like with getting sober: I announced to the world that I was sober so that I’d be held accountable. What I feel bad about is that this is some ‘KISS Final Tour of Mid-2013′ idea. I get that people might feel that way, but I’ve given up on trying to manage the spin on things. Nine Inch Nails felt right for me to do, and that’s because it felt uncomfortable in a lot of ways. That’s usually a sign for me that something might be interesting.” He last felt such seductive discomfort shortly after getting off the road in 2009, when director David Fincher approached him and Reznor collaborator Atticus Ross about scoring 2010’s The Social Network. “The process of working on that was surprisingly great,” Reznor says. “It was like the first Nine Inch Nails van tour — some of the most rewarding work I’ve ever done. At the time I’d just gotten married and was feeling like I was getting old to be touring, and I thought film-scoring could be a reinvention.” Reznor, who relocated from New Orleans to Los Angeles in 2005, won an Oscar for that moody, hypnotic Social Network score, and he and Ross worked with Fincher again on 2011’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. But those fulfilling experiences, he explains, were aberrations. “Seeing more about how Hollywood operates, you recognize that making movies is an economic calculation. If, by chance, a high-quality film comes out, that’s good, but it’s not about executing some great vision. Working with someone as smart as David Fincher isn’t normal. I love the idea of making films, and hopefully want to make one of my own someday, but it wasn’t a world I wanted to spend more time in.” Wait. So what Trent Reznor really wants to do is direct? “I’m thinking a super low-brow bro comedy,” he says dryly. “I’m into nut humor.” Even while Reznor was scoring the exploits of interpersonally awkward coding moguls and Swedish cyberpunks, he never stopped making music for himself. “Trent is always experimenting in the studio,” Ross says. “He doesn’t make some big announcement ahead of time and say, ‘This fragment will someday be a Nine Inch Nails song,’ but I knew that he’d return to Nails eventually.” The more vexing question was what Nine Inch Nails should be in the second decade of the 21st century. Sober, happily married, wildly successful in his other musical pursuits — what reason did Reznor have for bringing the band back to life?

Oversharing feels vulgar to me now. I know we’ve been fooled into thinking it’s okay to show dick pics and that the Kardashians’ behavior is normal, but it’s not.

In the time between 2007’s Year Zero (released on Interscope) and Hesitation Marks (released on Columbia), Trent Reznor hocked a lot of thick loogies in the direction of major labels. Publicly and repeatedly, he chided them for sticking their collective heads in the sand with regards to file-sharing. He thought that the suits were more inclined to sue fans than serve them. So he left.”At Interscope, it felt like we were one of 50 bands, and we didn’t sell as much as Eminem, so no one cared about us,” Reznor says, having finished the coffee and moved on to the Diet Coke. “Combine that with unquestionably wrong move after wrong move in terms of the response to new technologies — I just felt like I could figure things out better than they could.” He was correct, up to a point. 2008’s raw, jittery The Slip, offered for free on the NIN website, was downloaded 2.4 million times; a lavish, pricey physical package sold in the neighborhood of 250,000 copies. (That same year, he also offered the instrumental ambient collection Ghosts under his own Null Corporation umbrella.) “Being in control of your own destiny was great,” he says of the decision to go indie. “It felt good to have my own neck on the line. But you spend a lot of time figuring out who the influential blogger at some radio station is. Market research is not a sexy thing to think about. More than that, when you’re self-releasing, you have this walled garden of people that are interested in what you do, and to everyone else you’re invisible.” Meanwhile, as he sought to extend the boundaries of his fan base, he was reconsidering his role as a public figure. “I was excited about Twitter when we went out on our own because it felt like the most direct way to penetrate people’s attention,” says Reznor, an early and eager adopter of the platform, who in his mid-aughts guise was quick to volley with fans and fire shots at fellow musicians. “I also got a charge out of people realizing that I wasn’t a recluse sleeping in a coffin. But in hindsight, my experimenting with Twitter was a mistake. Oversharing feels vulgar to me now. I know we’ve been fooled into thinking it’s okay to show dick pics and that the Kardashians’ behavior is normal, but it’s not. I’ve tuned out in the last couple years. Everybody’s got a fucking opinion. It takes courage to put something out creatively into the world, and then to see it get trampled on by cunts? It’s destructive.” There’s another factor to Reznor’s more cautious approach to social media: “I’ve had the experience over the last few years of liking bands, and then checking what they’re up to on Tumblr or something, and immediately realizing, ‘This is you?’ Fuck.’ I don’t want my personality to get in the way of what I’m trying to do musically.” How to Destroy Angels , his ambient-pop project with Maandig and Ross; that was followed up with a full-length, Welcome oblivion, earlier this year. “It was no meddling, a modest advance, we split any profits,” he says. “If there used to be 100 people at a major working on a record, now there are 18, but they’re the good ones. There’s a lean, mean hunger. I’m not trying to be a major-label apologist, I’m just telling you what I saw. Instead of me and Rob Sheridan trying to figure things out, there’s an extra 15 people and the sense that someone in France was aware of what we were doing — instead of us hoping we’d remembered that France existed. So when a Nine Inch Nails album was in the works, and the mission was to try to make as many people aware of it as we can, we thought, ‘Let’s try it. Let’s see what happens.'” (Still, he adds that NIN’s deal with Columbia is “not long-term.”) But given Reznor’s willingness to call bullshit on the corporate overlords, was there any hesitance from said overlords to get into the Nine Inch Nails business? “With an artist like Trent, you have to trust that they’re making the decisions they want to make,” says Columbia Records Chairman Rob Stringer. “He’s been very smart about building up the demand for Nine Inch Nails by working on so many different things over the last few years — and the new record is so strong — that it feels like an opportunity for us to work with somebody who has an effect on pop culture. There was no trepidation on our part.” So far, so good. “Nine Inch Nails feels bigger than it ever has,” says a bemused Reznor. “Is it because we’re on Columbia? Is it scarcity? I don’t know, but it doesn’t feel bigger in the sense that we’ve desperately adopted some new clothing style. It feels organic, and it feels good not to be worrying about whether or not we shipped vinyl to the cool record store in Prague. I know that what we’re doing flies in the face of the Kickstarter Amanda-Palmer-Start-a-Revolution thing, which is fine for her, but I’m not super-comfortable with the idea of Ziggy Stardust shaking his cup for scraps. I’m not saying offering things for free or pay-what-you-can is wrong. I’m saying my personal feeling is that my album’s not a dime. It’s not a buck. I made it as well as I could, and it costs 10 bucks, or go fuck yourself.” There’s been a lot of change in the life of Nine Inch Nails, but also some constants. Twenty years and hundreds of performances down a crooked road, Trent Reznor still often chooses to say goodbye to his crowds with “Hurt,” the last track on The Downward Spiral, and the song that in its lean, confessional intensity is Hesitation Marks’ most direct emotional precursor.”When I was younger, to hear people singing that song, or any song, back to me? Holy shit, what a great feeling,” says Reznor, leaning forward. “Over time, that feeling corrupted me. I didn’t feel interesting enough to deserve it, and then I reinvented myself as a caricature. Money creeps in, people want to sleep with you, you distort. Add alcohol and drugs, and things go south fast. A song like ‘Hurt’ is reinterpreted by who I am now — and I like that person a lot more. “The person you’re talking to now is the real me — the smart, together me from high school,” Reznor continues. “I feel so much younger than I am. I wish I could change some things about the path it took to get here, but I feel lucky that I’m not as caught up in anger as I was.” Then a sinister glimmer flashes across his hazel eyes, and Trent Reznor does what he’s always done. “Believe me,” he says, offering that old unsettling reassurance. “There’s still no shortage of things that piss me off.”