From Daft Punk to Dystopia: Nine Inch Nails Redefine TRON’s Sound In Age of “Ares”

The Grid is back online, but it sounds much different this time around.

15 years after TRON: Legacy flickered across the multiplex, Disney’s third entry in its once-dormant cyber-saga has returned to theaters with a soundtrack that’s impossible to ignore. With Ares, director Joachim Rønning sought to grit up the franchise’s soundtrack in a creative pivot that started with the enlistment of Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, whose industrial textures replaced the direction once helmed by Daft Punk.

Where Daft Punk’s 2010 score for Legacy shimmered with equal parts warmth and mystique, Reznor and Ross deliver something closer to exposed wiring. The decorated duo, whose film scoring work spans from The Social Network to Pixar’s Soul, infused Ares with distorted dynamics and raw, serrated tension.

The previously released track “As Alive As You Need Me To Be” stands as the score’s perhaps most overt emotional statement, with Reznor’s voice emerging as an integral part of the film’s architecture. In a film about artificial life and identity, it becomes one of its most human moments.

Elsewhere, the score leans into its more visceral impulses. Tracks like “Forked Reality” ratchet tension through suspenseful strings and a growling low end. Meanwhile on “A Question of Trust” and the closing cue “Shadow Over Me,” Reznor and Ross embrace a palette of midtempo basslines and electronic percussion, layering their textures into a slow, spiraling descent.

Even as Ares expands the franchise’s visual and thematic scope, it’s the music that gives the story its backbone, brimming with a quiet sense of rebellion. You can listen to the full soundtrack below. TRON: Ares is now playing in theaters.