Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ Challengers [Mixed]: Review

Boys Noize has reworked Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ buzzing score for Luca Guadagnino’s new film Challengers into a 28 minute-long DJ set — and it’s astounding. Sequenced as one throbbing, hypnotic mix, the German-Iraqi DJ, producer, and songwriter creates a dreamscape of dance music that exhilarates at every turn. It’s one of the more unique collaborations spawned from a film score, and one of the finest dance albums of the year.

Reznor and Ross hand-selected Boys Noize to distill their score into an album. All of the composers’ touchstones are prominent in the mix — their industrial background, the cinematic synth sequences, the moments of majestic clarity offset by a dark chord change or a swallowing transition. The sheer pace of Challengers [Mixed] can almost keep the scores’ emotionality at arms-length. Almost, but not quite; Reznor and Ross’ softer elements emerge with devastating effect.

That emotional rawness can be heard on “L’oeuf,” a song bathed in a menacing light, with side-chained synths encircling a lone piano line. As the piano is overtaken by the synth’s warbling, icy crescendos, the experience is like drug-addled nausea. Then, “Challengers” races in like a bump of coke and brings you straight back to the dance floor.

These kinds of transitions make the continuous loop of Challengers [Mixed] more than just a film score, and more than just a dance album. If the film’s techno-ecstasy was meant to mirror the tête-à-tête of a tennis match, Boys Noize’s newly-throttled tempos feel like the match is playing out at Ping Pong speed, with so much frenzied action that visions begin to blur.

Listening to Challengers [Mixed], it’s clear that the Nine Inch Nails members and Rock Hall of Famers have found one of their great creative partners in Luca Guadagnino. “[It] was truly one of the best experiences we’ve had in this medium or as artists,” Reznor and Ross told Consequence in 2022 about their experience working on Guadagnino’s last film, Bones and All. Now, with the tennis drama as their latest Guadagnino collaboration, Reznor and Ross expanded their approach once again, offering an energetic, primal feel to the original score.

Reznor noted that Guadagnino asked the duo to create their score based on “unending homoerotic desire,” to great success. In her review of the film, Senior Entertainment Editor Liz Shannon Miller described the score as “bringing a level of bombast to the sports action that at times threatens to overwhelm the action, without ever actually proving distracting.”