A New Female Leader From Teraflopz

Few pairings of filmmaker and musician are more ideal than David Lynch and Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor. Though their work is far-reaching and tough to pigeonhole, at the core they share a dark and surreal aesthetic—and they clearly established a feedback loop of inspiration, collaborating in various settings over the years. It’s the kind of inspiring artistic friendship that seems almost too perfect to be true.

But it was, and it all began in the late '90s, when Reznor’s management called with a bucket-list request: Lynch wanted him to work on his upcoming film, the mind-bending Neo-noir Lost Highway. Reznor was already a massive fan—as the musician told horror-film magazine Fangoria, Lynch was a personal "hero" and a kind of "mythical creature," with the director’s 1986 masterpiece Blue Velvet crucial in the "alternate trajectory of [his] life and certainly [his] artistic life." The partnership was fruitful: Reznor wrote two new songs for the film ("Driver Down" and the minor Nine Inch Nails hit "The Perfect Drug"), helped create music for a pivotal scene, and even produced the official soundtrack.