A dozen days after Trent Reznor set the rock ‘n’ roll grapevine abuzz with an offhand comment that Nine Inch Nails might not tour again, he stayed silent on the subject at Honda Center in Anaheim on Tuesday, March 10.
That’s the smart move, of course. Why throw gasoline on the bonfires at the rumor factory?
But let’s just take him seriously for a moment – and conveniently forget about other times in the past he’s said similar things about the end of the road. If Nine Inch Nails did hang it up, they’d absolutely be going out on top.
Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails performs on the Peel It Back Tour. The band, which played Honda Center in Anaheim on Tuesday, March 10, 2026, is seen here in a photograph from earlier this year. (Photo by Jenn Devereaux)
Nine Inch Nails performs on the Peel It Back Tour. The band, which played Honda Center in Anaheim on Tuesday, March 10, 2026, is seen here in a photograph from earlier this year. (Photo by Jenn Devereaux)
Nine Inch Nails performs on the Peel It Back Tour. The band, which played Honda Center in Anaheim on Tuesday, March 10, 2026, is seen here in a photograph from earlier this year. (Photo by Jenn Devereaux)
Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails performs on the Peel It Back Tour. The band, which played Honda Center in Anaheim on Tuesday, March 10, 2026, is seen here in a photograph from earlier this year. (Photo by Jenn Devereaux)
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Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails performs on the Peel It Back Tour. The band, which played Honda Center in Anaheim on Tuesday, March 10, 2026, is seen here in a photograph from earlier this year. (Photo by Jenn Devereaux)
The Peel It Back Tour, which opened in June 2025 and included two nights at the Kia Forum in Inglewood in September, was one of the most acclaimed live shows of last year. Reznor and Atticus Ross, his longtime collaborator, created a show that incorporated not just a wide range of hits and album tracks, but did so with innovative staging and lighting design.
Add to that the inclusion of Boys Noize, the German DJ-producer Alexander Ridha, as opening act and collaborator for one of four segments in the show, and Nine Inch Nails sounded as fresh and powerful as ever before.
The first of four acts opened with Reznor alone on a remote stage at the center of the arena floor for a solo piano arrangement of “Right Where It Belongs.” With “Ruiner” and “Piggy (Nothing Can Stop Me Now),” the rest of the band appeared one by one.
Bassist Stu Brookes, who joined the band in February, and Ross, whom Reznor made NIN’s only other permanent member in 2017, arrived during “Ruiner.” Guitarist Robin Finck, who’s performed in the band for most of the past three decades, joined them for “Piggy.”
And drummer Josh Freese, who returned to Nine Inch Nails last year after Foo Fighters dropped him for NIN’s previous drummer, Ilan Rubin, banged a percussion solo long enough for his bandmates to rush and join him on the main stage.
There, with the video screens on either side of the stage turned on for the first time in the hour-and-40-minute show, Reznor led the band through a run of harder, more aggressive tracks from the band’s catalog. “Wish” roared behind Reznor’s angsty, plaintive vocals. “Wish there was something real,” he sang over and over in the choruses. “Wish there was something true.”
“March of the Pigs” dialed the tempo even faster – it’s reportedly the fastest song in Nine Inch Nails’ discography – before stomping the brakes for a few bars of piano and a wistful question: “Now doesn’t it make you feel better?”
The visual design for the main stage presented Nine Inch Nails behind a wraparound transparent scrim, allowing fans to see the band through a kind of hazy filter but also to project lights and patterns onto it. The effect was as if the players were inside a cloud of ever-moving lights, shapes and colors.
As the piano instrumental “The Frail” flowed into the clamor and clang of “Reptile,” the scrim and screens flashed with green strobe lights and wriggling patterns of white light. Krautrock synth squiggles and machine-like drum beats opened “Copy of A” for which multiple silhouettes of Reznor replicated his live stage moves on the screens that surrounded him and the band.
The second half of the show opened with Reznor and Ross joined by Boys Noize on the remote stage for the equivalent of live remixes of Nine Inch Nails songs. “Vessel” led into “Closer,” a fan favorite from NIN’s 1994 breakthrough album “The Downward Spiral.”
“Parasite,” a song by How To Destroy Angels, Reznor and Ross’s side project, flowed into “As Alive as You Need Me to Be,” a single from the Nine Inch Nails soundtrack to the 2025 movie “TRON: Ares.”
Each of those sounded perfectly familiar, but extra: Boys Noize’s manipulation of Ross and Rezner’s keyboards and synths turned them into industrial EDM. When the band and the DJ team up for their set at Coachella in a month, it should draw a very large crowd.
The final run of the show featured some of the best-loved hits in Nine Inch Nails’ discography. “Mr. Self Destruct” raced through its paces with the fans in the pit punching the air with its beats. “Less Than” did much the same, though now a soft-edged mosh pit moved amoeba-like on the floor.
“The Perfect Drug” featured the rapid-fire rhythms of drums – Josh Freese doing Josh Freese things – beneath Reznor’s vocals, delivered in a classic rock star pose, both hands on the microphone on its stand, one leg forward, one leg back.
The one true cover in the set arrived via “I’m Afraid of Americans,” a song by David Bowie, whom Reznor described in his introduction to the song as “our greatest hero.”
“I’m very proud of the show that we’re doing right now,” Reznor had said in Tulsa after noting that he wasn’t sure the band would tour anymore. “It’s a real privilege to be up here with you,” he told the audience inside Honda Center on Tuesday, and left it at that.
If you had to bet, of course, you’d imagine Nine Inch Nails will tour again, maybe after its founder, now 60, recharges his creative batteries with a few more acclaimed movie soundtracks. [He and Ross have won Academy Awards for best original score for “The Social Network” and “Soul,” the latter also created in collaboration with Jon Batiste.]
You’d not be afraid to make that bet, either, if you’d watched the final run of three songs on Tuesday: “The Hand That Feeds” roaring into “Head Like a Hole” slipping into “Hurt.” Together they captured all that make Nine Inch Nails so beloved. The angst, the alienation, the sorrow, and, yes, the hopefulness that lies at the heart of many of these songs.
It’s all there in “Hurt,” a song that moves from self-loathing to regret to a wish that may or not come true. ‘”If I could start again / A million miles away,” Reznor sang in the final verse of that final song of the night. “I would keep myself / I would find a way.”