Tent Reznor has been speaking to Gigwise during a spare moment while Nine Inch Nails tour Europe, telling them about the surprising speed with which he has written and recorded the band’s new album and his well-documented drug addiction during the nineties.

The the writing of new album, Year Zero, which is due for release on 16^th April, he said, “I think for the first time I’ve found out how to write music on tour, so for most of the With Teeth tour I was sitting on the back of buses, backstage, playing around with beats and stuff on my laptop and at the end of the tour last summer I had a good collection of things that passed the test, that felt musically solid and cohesive to me. I felt inspired and didn’t take any time off and moved out to the woods for a few months, rented a place and came up with the idea for Year Zero.”

This is a sharp contrast to the state in which he wrote material in the nineties, due to his addiction to drugs at the time, something he now recognises affected his creativity: “I can see now with pretty much crystal clear clarity that that aspect had governed my life. I had made writing out to be a terrifying prospect filled with pain and failure and some things that I dreaded doing because I’ve always lacked self-confidence and every other thing. By the end of my run with drugs I’d also realised that my brain wasn’t functioning right and I’d lost the power to really concentrate – it really made my art suffer, which made me feel worse, which made me want to get high and you know, that cycle starts up.”