Nine Inch Nails return with 'impenetrable' music

Industrial rockers Nine Inch Nails announced their first release in three years -- an EP that frontman Trent Reznor described as "impenetrable."

Reznor, who last year promised new Nine Inch Nails music within 2016, made good on his word with days to go and said that the five-song EP, "Not the Actual Events," would come out December 23.

"It's an unfriendly, fairly impenetrable record that we needed to make," Reznor said in a statement.

"It's an EP because that ended up being the proper length to tell that story."

Reznor did not further characterize the sound but said that it marked a departure from his recent material.

Since the last Nine Inch Nails album, 2013's "Hesitation Marks," Reznor has pursued various side projects with a more ambient sound.

His recent music has included work on soundtracks including to the new film "Before the Flood," a documentary on climate change led by Leonardo DiCaprio.

Reznor created Nine Inch Nails in the late 1980s as he was working as a janitor at a Cleveland recording studio and quickly won both an underground and mainstream audience.

With albums such as 1994's "The Downward Spiral," Nine Inch Nails pioneered a brand of industrial rock rooted in post-punk but guided by electronic elements and Reznor's searing voice of despair.

Reznor said that the new EP would mark the arrival of British sound engineer Atticus Ross as a full-fledged member of Nine Inch Nails.

Ross has been a longtime collaborator of Reznor, working with him on the Oscar-winning score to the 2010 Facebook drama "The Social Network" and the Grammy-winning music to dark thriller "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo."

Nine Inch Nails also announced that the band was remastering all of its major albums for vinyl editions to be released starting in 2017.

Reznor said the effort required "an insane attention to detail that you probably won't notice," but that he hoped to create definitive versions of the albums.