Nine Inch Nails artist ridicules pro-Trump fan group: ‘You’ve never actually listened to the lyrics’

‘We weren’t even remotely subtle,’ joked Rob Sheridan, the band’s former art director

Artist Rob Sheridan, known for his extensive collaborations with Nine Inch Nails, has expressed bemusement with a pro-Donald Trump fan group.

Nine Inch Nails, fronted by Trent Reznor, are known for their politically charged songs with progressive, left-wing messages.

On Twitter, Sheridan, who served as the band’s art director from 1999 to 2014, responded to a screenshot of a Facebook group called “Nine Inch Nails America”, which describes itself as “a group for fans of Nine Inch Nails who are Trump supporters, conservatives, or just despise what the ‘left’ has become in the US”.

“When you’ve never actually listened to the lyrics,” he said, captioning the picture.

“I just took a closer look at the godawful graphic of that FB group,” he continued. ”They’re specifically using my glitched ‘With Teeth’ version of the NIN logo that coincided with a song that was a direct dig at the Bush administration, but to be fair they’ve only had 15 years to figure that out.”

Sheridan also highlighted a backdrop which was used during the band’s 2008 tour, which featured a giant image of then-president George W Bush which morphed, over the course of a song, into the Republican presidential candidate John McCain.

“The gag was that old white Repub warmongers were so similar, you didn’t even realise it was happening,” he had previously explained.

Referring back to the tour, Sheridan joked that the band “weren’t even remotely subtle”.

Nine Inch Nails are far from the first band to have fans miss the political point of their music. Last month, right-wing fans of Rage Against the Machine were mocked online for boycotting the band after belatedly realising the group’s (overt) political leanings.

Sheridan made reference to the Rage Against the Machine furore in his tweets, writing: “The Venn Diagram of members of this group and people who complained about [Rage Against the Machine member] Tom Morello getting ‘too political’ is a big dumb circle.”