Schism at Triple B in Las Vegas After Nine Inch Nails 2026 - Spiral Out Network

Schism Gave Tool Fans the Deep Cuts at Triple B

After Nine Inch Nails emptied the arena, Schism turned Triple B into an after-hours home for Tool fans still chasing the songs the real band rarely plays.

text Kris West
March 28, 2026

Images by Kris West / Spiral Out Network

March 7 in Las Vegas turned into a two-show night for people with no interest in going home early. Nine Inch Nails played MGM Grand Garden Arena, and when that crowd spilled out, Schism took over Backstage Bar & Billiards — Triple B — for a midnight after-show aimed straight at the same kind of obsessive music fans who still had gas left in the tank. That setup is the clever part of Schism’s whole operation. They do not just tour as a Tool tribute band. They slide into town after bigger shows and catch the crowd while the adrenaline is still burning. I had seen them do it before after Tool. This time it was right after Nine Inch Nails, and it made perfect sense.

Schism is Tool fans’ side chick, the after-hours affair that gives you all the things the real relationship stopped giving you. Tool is still the wife, the obsession, the one you built your life around. Schism is the Hooker with a Penis fantasy made real — loud, dirty, funny, and more than happy to hand fans the deep cuts and old favorites they are probably never getting from Tool again.

The current singer is a big part of why that works. Nick Serr does not fall into the usual tribute-band trap of trying to do a stiff Maynard karaoke impression. He approaches the material in his own way, rougher around the edges and more direct, and that actually helps. The songs still hit like Tool songs, but the performance has its own pulse. It is raw in the right way, and in a room like Triple B that kind of delivery feels better than a hollow imitation ever could.

Schism has been doing this for a long time, tracing its history back to 2001, and they play like it. These are not guys getting by on bald caps, projected visuals, and audience goodwill. They can actually handle the material. Every odd accent, every weird time-signature turn, every metallic little detail, every stop-start shift that makes Tool songs feel like machinery built by lunatics is there. Tool is not easy music to fake. Schism does not fake it. They get inside it.

That is what makes them more than a novelty. The real band still has the scale, the mystique, and the authority of being the real thing. It also has a modern live show that stays pretty tightly controlled. Schism comes at the catalog from the opposite direction. They play a grueling two and a half hours and spend that time digging into the songs Tool fans still talk about like unfinished business. The value is not just that Schism sounds close to Tool. The value is that they play the songs people still want.

That matters when a set includes songs like “Lateralus,” “H.,” “Part of Me,” “Bottom,” and “Third Eye.” Those are not casual picks for people looking to hear the radio version of Tool. Those are songs with history, songs fans carry around for years because they know there is a decent chance the real band is never going to hand them over again. Schism understands exactly where that ache lives. They build the night around it.

The crowd at Triple B was fully with them. This was not some half-distracted bar crowd staring into drinks and waiting for a familiar chorus. The room was packed with believers. Tool fans are wired a certain way, obsessive to the point of comedy until you are standing in the middle of them and realize that obsession is the culture. That energy transfers cleanly to Schism. They are not filling stadiums, but they are filling the rooms they are supposed to fill, and they are getting people to sing, shout, and lock into every ugly left turn those songs make.

What Schism understands better than most tribute bands is appetite. Tool fans do not just want accuracy. They want access. They want the longer set, the heavier pull from older material, the songs that have slipped out of sight, the sense that somebody onstage still remembers the deeper corners of the catalog and treats them like they matter. That is the lane Schism owns, and on March 7 they owned it in a packed downtown room full of people who knew exactly why they were there.

After Nine Inch Nails finished across town, Schism gave Tool fans the part they usually do not get: the extra set, the deep cuts, the after-midnight version of the relationship. That is why the band works. It is not parody. It is not cosplay. It is a well-played, well-timed, fully self-aware answer to a real hunger inside this fanbase. For the people packed into Triple B that night, Schism was not a backup plan. Schism was the plan after the plan.

Tags: Schism, Tool tribute, Triple B, Backstage Bar & Billiards, Las Vegas, Nine Inch Nails, live review, Tool fans, Spiral Out Network

Website: www.spiraloutpodcast.com

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Nine Inch Nails - MGM GRAND - Peel It Back Tour 2026

 

Nine Inch Nails – Peel It Back Tour

Las Vegas — A show built on layers

Peel It Back is a good title because it tells you what the show is doing before the band even starts. Not in some grand, mystical way. In a practical one. The production keeps removing distance, then adding it back, then stripping it away again. That is the real shape of the night. Nine Inch Nails brought the Peel It Back tour to the MGM Grand Garden Arena with Boys Noize opening and a two-stage setup that put part of the show in the middle of the floor and the rest on a larger main stage wrapped in translucent surfaces.

Boys Noize opened the night before Nine Inch Nails took the stage. His set included “Girl Crush,” “Revolt,” “Love & Validation,” “Down in It,” “Enjoy the Silence,” and “Euphoria.”

Then the structure of the show took over. The design uses a B-stage placed in the center of the arena floor, surrounded on all sides by the audience, and a main stage built out with translucent scrims and layered projection surfaces. It changes how the set breathes. The band begins inside the crowd, then moves outward into something larger, then returns to the center and collapses the space again. It gives the whole night a pulse without relying on the usual arena move of simply making everything bigger.

The first act opened on the B-stage with “(You Made It Feel Like) Home,” “Ruiner,” and “Piggy (Nothing Can Stop Me Now).” Then the show shifted to the main stage for “Wish,” “March of the Pigs,” “The Frail,” “Reptile,” “Heresy,” “Copy of A,” and “Gave Up.” After that, the band returned to the B-stage, where Boys Noize folded directly into the set for “Vessel,” “Closer,” and “As Alive as You Need Me to Be.” The final act moved back to the main stage for “Mr. Self Destruct,” “Less Than,” “The Perfect Drug,” “I’m Afraid of Americans,” “The Hand That Feeds,” “Head Like a Hole,” and “Hurt.”

That sequence matters more than breaking down individual songs. The set keeps changing scale. The B-stage pulls Reznor and Ross into the crowd and removes distance. The main stage stretches the same energy across the room. Back and forth all night. Close. Wide. Close again. A lot of arena shows are built to prove how large they are. This one keeps adjusting how far away you are from it.

The visual system pushes that further. The production uses layered scrims, interior surfaces, side screens, and live camera feeds that create multiple versions of the same moment at once. You are not just watching the band. You are watching the band, then a delayed image of the same moment, then another version arriving somewhere else. The image never settles.

A handheld camera tracks the performance and feeds those angles back into the system. Sometimes the image lags. Sometimes it doubles. During “Copy of A,” that delay lines up with the repetition in the music. Multiple versions of the same figure, slightly out of sync.

The lighting follows the same logic. Red establishes the early palette. White cuts through it in hard bursts. Blue shifts the tone later without softening it. There are stretches where the band exists only as silhouettes behind the scrim, then the surface clears and the structure comes forward again. Nothing stays covered for long.

Josh Freese returned to Nine Inch Nails for this leg after Ilan Rubin moved to Foo Fighters. Freese had already held the role in earlier years. The playing is direct and consistent with the rest of the production. No extra emphasis. No variation from what the structure requires.

Boys Noize is not separated from the show. He is folded into it. The electronic material stays connected to the same framework rather than sitting off to the side.

The final stretch holds the same line. “Mr. Self Destruct,” “Less Than,” and “The Perfect Drug” maintain tension without expanding it into something larger. David Bowie’s “I’m Afraid of Americans” fits into the same structure instead of standing apart from it. “The Hand That Feeds” opens the space slightly, and “Head Like a Hole” pulls it back together.

“Hurt” closes the set without change. No extended arrangement. No added staging. The performance ends where the song ends.

The Nine Inch Nails logo remains above the stage after the lights drop. No projection layers. No camera feed. Just the frame left behind.

The sequence stays consistent from beginning to end: the room turns, the band appears inside it, the movement between stages continues, images split and delay across surfaces, the camera feed layers over the performance, Freese holds the drum position, Boys Noize stays integrated, Bowie sits inside the final run, and Reznor appears in multiple places at once—on stage, on screen, slightly offset.

Peel It Back runs as a system.

Distance changes.

Perspective shifts.

The image separates from the source.

By the end, there is no single version of what you are watching.

And that is the point.

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