When it was released in 2007, Trent Reznor called Nine Inch Nails' Year Zero album "the soundtrack to a movie that doesn't exist". In a way, that may not be the case for much longer, since Reznor is some way towards setting Year Zero up as a TV series.
Year Zero is a concept album (ie. one with a loose narrative linking all the tracks) targeting the American political system and describing a dystopian state heading towards the end of the world. It quite overtly uses 1984, Brave New World and Fahrenheit 451 as touchstones for its theme of "the erosion of freedom". The "story", about a "Bureau of Morality" forming in the wake of a nuclear war between America and Iran, takes place in 2022, the same year as Soylent Green. Reznor says it's "an essay about where the world might be if we continue down this path..."
Always a multimedia enterprise, the Year Zero album was accompanied by a sophisticated online game (sadly no longer live), and a film or TV series was always part of the plan. It's taken this long because, says Reznor, "I've learned that television development moves at a glacial pace. There's a thousand hurdles before anything shows up on your TV listing, but it's very much alive and incubating. It cleared the HBO hurdle a few months ago, and now we're writing drafts back and forth."
Trent's collaborators are Daniel Knauf (creator of Carnivale), Kevin Kelly Brown (Roswell), and Lawrence Bender (Pulp Fiction), and if the plan remains the same as it was in 2007, the series will last for two years. "It's the most exciting thing on the horizon," said Reznor of his industrial metal TV apocalypse. "When I wake up in the morning it makes me say 'God it would be cool if that happened!'".
It's a while away yet, but in the meantime you can hear a Reznor soundtrack to a movie that does exist, when The Social Network is released on October 15.