Though Nine Inch Noize first surfaced on the Coachella 2026 lineup announcement last September, the project was only recently confirmed as an official studio collaboration between Nine Inch Nails and German producer Boys Noize. The partnership’s debut release, Nine Inch Noize, designated Halo 38, arrives on April 17th via The Null Corporation and Boysnoize Records. The announcement came just ahead of the project’s first official live appearance in the festival’s Sahara tent on Saturday night.
The forthcoming album’s promotional rollout began with a billboard in Indio, California, before Nine Inch Nails formally unveiled the release through their official channels. At the time, little had been made public beyond the release date and cover art, but the reveal made clear that Nine Inch Noize is being positioned as a proper full-length collaboration rather than a one-off remix exercise or live-only detour.
That collaboration made its onstage debut at Coachella on April 11th, with Mariqueen Maandig of How to Destroy Angels joining for part of the set. Drawing from across the Nine Inch Nails catalog, the performance opened with “Vessel” and moved through tracks including “She’s Gone Away,” “Heresy,” “Copy of A,” “Me, I’m Not,” “Closer,” “The Warning,” and “Came Back Haunted.”
The performance also included “Parasite” by How to Destroy Angels, along with a cover of Soft Cell’s “Memorabilia” (originally featured on the 1994 Closer to God CD release). The set closed with “As Alive as You Need Me to Be,” and the group is scheduled to return to the Sahara stage for Coachella Weekend Two on April 18th.
The connection between Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross, and Alexander Ridha has been steadily building for some time. Boys Noize has appeared in Nine Inch Nails’ orbit as a touring collaborator of the band’s acclaimed Peel It Back Tour and has also worked with Reznor and Ross on projects outside the core band catalog. In 2024, he reworked the duo’s Challengers score for the release of Challengers [MIXED] by Boys Noize. More recently, he was also involved in the wider orbit of the Tron: Ares soundtrack campaign.
That history makes Nine Inch Noize feel less like a surprise and more like the next logical step. Reznor and Ross have spent the last several years moving fluidly between film composition, electronic textures, and the harder rhythmic machinery that has long defined Nine Inch Nails at its most club-facing. Boys Noize, meanwhile, has built his reputation on a body of work that pushes electro, techno, and distortion-heavy production into blunt, high-impact forms. Bringing those approaches together under a shared banner gives a proper name to a partnership that has already been visible in fragments.
With the album arriving on April 17th and the live debut now complete, Nine Inch Noize is positioned as a major new entry in the broader Nine Inch Nails universe. More details on the album are expected soon.
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