The industrial-rock behemoth is set to perform at Japan’s Fuji Rock Fest.

In an extensive interview with The New York Times, Reznor opens up about NIN’s forthcoming album, Hesitation Marks, and the process of bringing the band’s impressive live show back on the road.

The visuals for the band’s summer festival shows are inspired by the Talking Heads 1983 tour, which was filmed as Stop Making Sense (coincidentally, the NIN logo is partially inspired by the Heads’ Remaining In Light art). The complex movements of lights and video screens have to be choreographed with time-codes, but Reznor promises “no dance moves.”

Surprisingly, the band will scrap the festival set-up and start from scratch before a fall arena tour. “The fact that we’re doing all this only for these few shows, and then we have to do it over again, throwing all this out to do a completely new thing, with new things that won’t work,” Reznor said, “that feels a little insane.”

As for Hesitation Marks, NIN’s first album since 2008’s The Slip, Reznor relied on his laptop and came up with “austere, brittle, sneakily evolving grooves.” “It feels sparse, and it feels minimal,” he said. “It’s hard for me to do that. I’ve realized over the years that if I have 100 tracks, I’ll use 110 tracks. This was really about economy. It was just a weird puzzle of grooves.”

The album also looks back on The Downward Spiral: “I don’t think it’s a gentle record. I do think it’s more subversive in how it gets you. It’s not about everything being at 11 and the pyrotechnics of sound and scare tactics, which I’ve definitely used in the past. But it doesn’t feel like the middle-aged, I’ve-given-up record either.”

Stream Nine Inch Nails’ Fuji Rock Fest performance at 21:30 8:30am EST / 1:30pm BST tomorrow. [via NIN Hotline]