Trent Reznor

American musician, singer, songwriter, record producer, and composer, best known as the lead vocalist, multi-instrumentalist, and principal songwriter of the industrial rock band Nine Inch Nails, which he founded in 1988 and of which he was the sole official member until 2016. The first Nine Inch Nails album, Pretty Hate Machine (1989), was a commercial and critical success. The Grammy and Oscar winning Reznor has since released 11 more Nine Inch Nails studio albums.

Reznor began studying piano when he was five years old and later taught himself to play both the tuba and saxophone. When his parents divorced in 1970, he went to live with his maternal grandparents. He attended Allegheny College in Pennsylvania where he studied computer engineering before moving to Cleveland in 1987. There he worked with several bands, finally achieving minor fame with the group, Problems.

In 1988, he formed his own band, Nine Inch Nails (NIN), and although their first album, Industrial Nation, was never released, their second effort, Pretty Hate Machine (1989), was quite successful. Using his own feelings of alienation and his memories of being an "outsider" as a child, he channeled his own pain into the music, resulting in a product that, although controversial, is considered quite memorable. Always restless, he kept personal control himself of all the writing and production.

Reznor and his manager, John Malm, formed their own record label, Nothing Records, in 1992 and released "Broken," for which Reznor received his first Grammy. He won his second Grammy in 1996 for "Happiness in Slavery." He produced the soundtrack for Oliver Stone’s film, Natural Born Killers, an imaginative but disturbing mix of music and dialogue.

Beginning in 2010, Reznor, alongside Atticus Ross, began to work on film and television scores. The pair won the Academy Award for Best Original Score for The Social Network in 2010.