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. In 2013, the pair won a Grammy Award for Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media for their soundtrack to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. In 2021, Reznor, Ross, and Jon Batiste won the Golden Globe and the Academy Award for the soundtrack for Pixar’s Soul.
Reznor had a brief affair with Courtney Love, musician Kurt Cobain’s widow, during the mid-1990s. Reznor married Filipino-American singer-songwriter Mariqueen Maandig, born 5 April 1981, in October 2009. They have four children: sons Lazarus Echo Reznor (born 10 October 2010), Balthazar Venn Reznor (born 31 December 2011), a third son whose name has not been revealed (born 1 November 2015), daughter Nova Lux Reznor (born December 2016) and a fourth son whose name has not been revealed (born January 2020).
Link to Wikipedia biography