“The difficulty of doing promotional press,” he continues, leaning forward and fixing K! right in the eyes, “is that I feel we’re having a conversation, a discussion, in which some relevant points are made, and some stupid shit comes along, too. It’s not the fault of the New York Times piece itself, but the other 50 articles that reference it, with headlines like ‘Trent Reznor slams Taylor Swift’. It goes around the room and suddenly I’m like, ‘I said what?!’ It’s pointless to try to explain, particularly to the angry mob.”
“They don’t want an explanation,” chips in Atticus quietly.
“They’re not interested,” agrees Trent. “I saw someone ask, ‘Why are you attacking women?’ I thought, ‘What the fuck are you talking about?’”
Despite falling foul of what he describes as “copycat journalists playing [a game of] Telephone”, Trent remains a remarkably relaxed interviewee, both courteous and chatty (his answer to K!’s opening question, about how Bad Witch developed from its genesis to the final version, stretches to just over 10 minutes.)
“We spent a couple of months, I wouldn’t say going through the motions, we were exploring a lot of different avenues, but there was something that just wasn’t clicking,” he offers midway through the response so epic that he apologises for it afterwards. “I think partly it was that, thematically, where I thought it was going to develop ultimately felt a bit lazy. I hadn’t developed the idea completely, and I was avoiding the hard work. At the time, it was tough to admit that.”
Trent and Atticus love their work, with both using the word “joyful” to describe the prospect of being in the studio, even when it’s to produce music that deals with the notion of humanity being “bacteria in a jar”. Despite this nihilistic outlook, Trent claims that he’s not pessimistic in his family life – so how do these two sides sit together? How do they engage with one another? Would Atticus describe himself as a pessimist.
“Basically,” Atticus begins, “I think I’m…“
“Yes,” Trent cuts in with a laugh.
“I’m not wholly pessimistic, but I’m not a font of optimism, either,” clarifies Atticus. “There are so many compartments to life, though it’s hard not to feel pessimistic in terms of the obvious areas.”