Starting with 2008’s sprawling collection of instrumental work Ghosts I-IV (released under the Nine Inch Nails aegis) and accelerating with 2010’s Oscar-winning score for David Fincher’s The Social Network, the instrumental side of Trent Reznor has effectively shared equal billing with the more traditional industrial rock that made him a superstar. Never one for half measures, Reznor clearly sees the film-soundtrack work done alongside his longtime composing partner Atticus Ross as a chance to flex. “We aim for these to play like albums that take you on a journey and can exist as companion pieces to the films and as their own separate works,” Reznor wrote recently. He’s not kidding: The duo’s score for Fincher’s 2011 film The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, for instance, is 15 minutes longer than the movie itself.
In announcing the release of Bird Box, the score for Netflix’s treacly Sandra Bullock survival-horror film of the same name, Reznor described it as a way of presenting the audience with “a significant amount of music and conceptual sound” that didn’t make the film’s final cut. Even then, that “Abridged” parenthetical in the title points toward “a more expansive” version of the album due later this year. It’s just as well since what Reznor and Ross have created is better than the movie they created it for. It does exactly what good soundtracks are capable of doing, and what they expressly intend for it to do: Emerge as a rewarding experience in its own right.
Songs like the subtly intimidating “Hand Covers Bruise” and the melancholy “Soft Trees Break the Fall” from Reznor and Ross’s breakthrough Social Network score still set the template for much of what’s going on here, using gentle keyboard-based melodies to establish an emotional baseline, while adding varying degrees of electronic noise to ratchet up the ominousness or relief depending on the needs of the moment. Album opener “Outside,” for example, charts a 12-minute course from quiet piano exercise to carrion-insect buzzing, with a gap inserted at the halfway point as if to say, “OK, time for the scary shit to start.” Later tracks “A Hidden Moment” and “Last Thing Left” find the pair in full grownup lullaby mode, twirling and twinkling their way through Reznor’s unmistakable melodic signatures.
But despite its familiar sonic hallmarks, Bird Box is not the work of one-trick ponies. You’d never mistake this album for, say, the Reznor/Ross soundtrack to Jonah Hill’s coming-of-age film mid90s from 2018, which provides a neat apples-to-apples comparison. The companion EP for that movie is all major-key optimism; it sounds a lot like looking at the partly-sunny sky on the album cover feels. Bird Box, by contrast, employs an array of techniques to convey anxiety, impending danger, and the sense that safety and happiness are never guaranteed—subject matter that suits a Nine Inch Nails lyric sheet just as well as a Netflix fright flick.