Peel It Back Tour: Closer Than Ever to Nine Inch Nails
Nine Inch Nails plus Boys Noize, aka Nine Inch Noize, during the 2025 Peel It Back Tour—all concert photos by Niyaz Pirani
Nine Inch Nails continues to push their music to new, extreme heights sonically and visually nearly 40 years into a career that is as historically influential as it is consistently groundbreaking.
For the “Peel It Back” Tour, which stopped at Los Angeles’ Kia Forum Sept. 18 and 19, 2025, the band took attendees on an audio journey through their many phases—and simultaneously—a visual journey through their distortion and into their core.
Formed in the late 80s by Trent Reznor, Nine Inch Nails also includes longtime collaborator and keyboardist Atticus Ross (with whom Reznor won a Golden Globe and an Emmy), plus an infrequently rotating cast of live band members (guitarist Robin Finck, bassist Alessandro Cortini, and newly returning drummer Josh Freeze, who was behind NIN’s kit in the late 2000s). NIN creates industrial rock with electronic, ambient, and experimental elements. They want to fuck you like an animal.
German DJ and label owner Alexander Ridha (aka Boys Noize), a recent collaborator of NIN, took the opening spot. Later he would also become a central piece of the main show. DJing since his mid-teens, he officially adopted the Boys Noize name in 2004 and has spent over two decades becoming one of electronic music’s premier performers and producers. He’s remixed for Daft Punk, David Lynch, and more; co-written for Lady Gaga; and collaborated with Skrillex, and now Nine Inch Nails.
Boys Noize Opens for Nine Inch Nails at Kia Forum
Ridha’s sets can be quite different from the one he unraveled from atop a riser in the crowd. Typically spinning a mix of hard techno and electro house, this set leaned into those elements to a degree but was more so one of the funkier goth dance sets I’ve ever heard. Blips of NIN favorites and the song “Challengers” made their way into the mix, connecting the opener to the headliner. Things got weird at the end when he paired a breathy backbeat with a looped sample of a man screaming to create a glitchy Mortal Kombat-esque freak-out that faded directly into the beginning of NIN’s set.
Simply put, it was fucking weird. I loved it.
NIN on the B Stage
As the lights swirled around the arena, Nine Inch Nails appeared from inside a giant black box positioned in the middle of the arena to kick off their show. Starting and ending the show with two poignant, minimal piano-driven pieces (“Right Where It Belongs” and “Hurt”), everything sandwiched in between would become a feast for the senses.
The crushing mix of hard guitars, thunderous drums and layers of electronics cut as deep as they ever have, and somehow, Trent, too, sounds as great as he always has, if not the best he’s ever been. Credit is equally due to Creative Producer Cory Fitzgerald, Creative Director John Crawford, MTLA Studio, lighting designer Paul Guthrie, projectionists Darkmatter, and videographer Ian Hurdle.
Together they created one of the best live shows I’ve ever seen by pairing layers of fabric with timed lighting to cast 3-D-ish effects of the band performing that mesmerized song after song. I’ve never seen anything like it and it’s hard to describe unless you were there. The videos get close but don’t truly do it justice.
Notably, the set was broken into four parts, first behind a stage-encompassing sheet (with another sheet dividing the stage in the middle across it), and ending with the sheet removed and the performance “peeled back.”
The ferocity of “Wish” into “March of the Pigs” early on, plus the infinite shadow effect and dark-disco-step of “Copy of A” (above) were highlights early on while “The Perfect Drug,” punctuated by an incredible drum solo courtesy of Freese, and a more-harrowing-than-ever “I’m Afraid of Americans” into a laser-sharp “The Hand That Feeds” held down the back end.
In the middle of the mayhem came four-songs by the collaboration of NIN and Boys Noize born from work on the recent NIN “Tron: Ares” soundtrack, the single “As Alive as You Need Me to Be,” and “Challengers.” Billed now as Nine Inch Noize (and playing night one for two weekends of Coachella 2026 next April), the group reworked three NIN songs and aired the “Tron” single in what was undoubtedly the best part of the entire show.
The cut-up industrial stomp through a remix of the time-tested love song “Closer” somehow brought us EVEN CLOSER to God. Punchy clubbed-up versions of “Vessel” and “Came Back Haunted” surprised and shook asses while an extended version of the “Tron” single took the song to new extremes and heights.
BOTH WEEKENDS OF BIEBERCHELLA ARE SOLD OUT—Coachella.com
With this being the teaser trailer, I can’t wait for next April to see what an hour long version of this collab will sound like and how they will further reimagine NIN classics to push both the industrial and electronic further into the future.
NIN and Boys Noize will be back on the road before their Coachella appearance in early 2026, as a second leg of the Peel It Back Tour was just announced for early February to the middle of March. Tickets are on sale Oct. 8 and tour dates are below.
This is part of a larger article by Niyaz Pirani. You can read it on Substack.
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