The years of With Teeth and Year Zero had caused a new creative team to start to strongly coalesce around Trent Reznor, anchored particularly by future formal NIN member Atticus Ross, who had been working on and off with him for some years. The first full flowering of this was the Ghosts I-IV collection, a series of instrumental explorations that helped not only explore the darkly beautiful textures and haunted piano Reznor had long favored but set the stage for Reznor and Ross’s extensive soundtrack work to come — not to mention inadvertantly providing Lil Nas X the core sample for “Old Town Road.”

– Ned Raggett