“I was just out for a run with Spotify playing, and some Nine Inch Nails came up,” Brooker recalls. “And I thought, You know what? You could turn this into bubblegum pop. You could turn this into dance pop if you tweaked it a bit.”

Before the script was even finished, Brooker and his team reached out to Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor, who happened to be a big fan of the series. (Reznor’s composing partner, Atticus Ross, provided the score for the Season 4 episode “Crocodile,” in fact.)

“I didn’t question the integrity of how it would be used,” Reznor tells GQ. “It was a flattering ask, and I thought, Yeah, let’s try it, let’s see.”

Brooker got to work rewriting the lyrics of a couple of Nine Inch Nails songs to make them more positive before working with co-showrunner Annabel Jones and episode director Anne Sewitsky to set the lyrics to upbeat music—with lots of input from Cyrus, of course.

“The idea is that the pop versions of the songs are insanely positive, full of empty affirmations,” Brooker says. “She’s singing, ‘I’m on a roll,’ and it struck me as amusing to then reveal that she was singing 'Head Like a Hole.'"

Once you know that “On a Roll” is a sneaky cover of “Head Like a Hole,” it’s impossible not to hear the similarities. Even if lyrics like “Bow down before the one you serve” have been warped into “I’m stoked on ambition and verve,” it’s still undeniably the 1990 Nine Inch Nails hit.

In addition to “Head Like a Hole” (which Cyrus also performs a more genre-faithful cover of during the end credits), the episode also features a pop-ified cover of “Right Where It Belongs.” Brooker says he rewrote a version of “Hurt,” too, turning it into “Flirt,” but couldn’t figure out how to fit it in the episode.

“They’re hilariously catchy! Which, of course, is what they are, what [the songs] are designed to be,” co-executive producer Annabel Jones says. “It’s funny, for sort of a satirical take on a pop star, we were humming them ourselves. Everybody throughout the production was singing along unknowingly.”

Reznor, who's quick to praise Cyrus’s performance in the episode both as an actor and as a musician covering some of his greatest hits, enjoyed the results, too.

“I think the most exciting part was when the music tracks came back. You can’t listen to it without a smile. I put it on in the car with my wife, and she was like, ‘What the fuck is that?’” he says. “It’s just so well done in that style.”