Hear Nine Inch Nails’ Explosive New Song ‘Burning Bright (Field on Fire)’

Nine Inch Nails present a grim wall of distortion on their new song, “Burning Bright (Field on Fire).” It’s the final track on the band’s latest EP, Not the Actual Events, which arrives on Friday.

“Burning Bright (Field on Fire)” centers around crackling piles of electronic fuzz. Declarative vocals hover just out of reach beyond the staticky forcefield, as if Trent Reznor is hollering his words into the mouth of a volcano. For brief moments, Reznor’s words become clear: “Break through the surface and breathe.” As Reznor told Rolling Stone, Not the Actual Events was “an unfriendly, fairly impenetrable record that we needed to make.”

2017 looks like it will be rife with new Nine Inch Nails material. The band will release a quadruple-vinyl version of The Fragile: Deviations 1, which will contain previously unreleased material, along with “definitive” vinyl editions of early NIN records: Broken, The Downward Spiral and The Fragile.

Not the Actual Events is due out December 23rd. According to NIN’s website, physical product ships out the week of January 1st.