Miniature hard drives stashed in bathrooms. Unlisted phone numbers that lead to ominous messages. A small constellation of mysterious Web sites chronicling a grim future 15 years away. This is how Trent Reznor is letting the world — or some fanatical portion thereof — know about “Year Zero” (Nothing Records/Interscope), the new Nine Inch Nails album, which arrives in shops today. Open the packaging and you’ll find another secret message: the disc itself changes color with heat, turning white to display the copyright information and a long string of ones and zeroes. In this paranoid world, everything worth knowing is a secret.

Mr. Reznor has been making aggressive computer music under the name Nine Inch Nails for about two decades, but it was “The Downward Spiral,” his bilious but elegant 1994 blockbuster, that confirmed his position as a true rock star in an era largely devoid of them. He released a colder-blooded double album, “The Fragile,” in 1999, then laid low for half a decade. His seething 2005 CD, “With Teeth,” felt like a comeback, a reminder to his fans — and maybe to himself — that he hadn’t retired after all.

Apparently the follow-up came quickly: Mr. Reznor has said the new album “began as an experiment with noise on a laptop in a bus on tour somewhere.” (A sticker on the cover bears a promise, or a warning: “16 noisy new songs.”) But “Year Zero” is much more seductive than “With Teeth,” partly because of all the so-called noise. Hard beats are softened with distortion, static cushions the tantrums, sneaky bass lines float beneath the surface. And as usual the music is packed with details: “Meet Your Master” goes through at least three cycles of decay and rebirth; part of the fun of “The Warning” is tracking the ever-mutating timbres.

Image Trent Reznor, who records under the name Nine Inch Nails. Credit... Richard Perry/The New York Times

If all these sounds often distract listeners from Mr. Reznor’s lyrics, well, so much the better. In the year 2022, apparently, clumsy sloganeering is all the rage. The album’s first single, “Survivalism,” includes the phrase “Mother Nature is a whore,” a sarcastic expression of anti-environmentalism. And “Capital G,” which sounds a lot like an anti-Bush diatribe, has another deluded narrator we’re supposed to hate: “I pushed a button and elected him to office and a/He pushed a button and it dropped a bomb.”