Steve Albini, the musician who came to fame in the indie music world through a trio of bands – Big Black, Rapeman, and Shellac – before becoming one of the biggest names in the world of alt-rock production and engineering via his work with such bands as the Pixies, Nirvana, the Wedding Present, and even Cheap Trick, has died at the age of 61.
Albini, whose death was first announced by Pitchfork, died of a heart attack. His passing occurs only a week in advance of To All Trains, the first new Shellac album in a decade, which the band was planning to tour behind.
'Look at this goof,' Albini wrote when posting this photo on Twitter in 2022
Born in Pasadena, California on July 22, 1962, Albini had two pivotal moments in his teens that would help to define the remainder of his life. The first was breaking his leg, the recovery from which led him to learn to play bass guitar, while the second was when a classmate introduced him to the Ramones.
“I was on a school field trip, and on the school field trip somebody on the bus had a portable cassette recorder which was, at that time, a novelty,” Albini said in a 1993 interview. “He was playing this tape of the Ramones which I thought, everyone on the bus thought, was the most hilarious record ever made. The first Ramones album. We all thought it was totally hilarious. No one took it seriously at all.
“Anyway, I lived by the record for about six months,” he continued. “Initially it was comedy, it was a gag. We just thought, ‘Oh, this is that goofy record.’ But then...it developed to the point where I thought. . .suddenly it made sense to me. I thought, ‘Yeah, this is the perfect form of rock music.’ I was totally rabid after that. I bought anything that anybody called a punk rock record. I bought anything that I could find in the record shop. Used, new records that didn’t look familiar, that looked punk rock. I just completely immersed myself.”
Albini played in a number of bands throughout his teens, but it was during his years as a student at Northwestern University – where he picked up a journalism degree – that he formed his first band of note, Big Black. Proving his music skill, Alibi played all of the instruments on the band’s 1982 debut EP, Lungs, except for saxophone, which was handled by his friend John Bohnen. The band’s lineup would expand with their second EP, 1983’s Bulldozer, to include bassist Jeff Pezzati, “smash” guitarist Santiago Durango (as opposed to Albini’s credited “klang” guitar), and drummer Pat Byrne, but by the time of 1985’s Racer-X EP, Byrne was out, as the band was strictly using a Roland drum machine.
Big Black only lasted for two full-length studio LPs – 1986’s Atomizer and 1987’s Songs About F--king – before Albini called it a day, but he promptly started a new outfit: the delicately-named Rapeman. They lasted an even shorter period of time, only issuing a single EP (Budd) and a single studio album (Two Nuns and a Pack Mule) before closing up shop, and it’s possible that at least part of that came about as a result of their name.
“There was tremendous brouhaha,” Albini told Adam Dolgins in his book Rock Names. “On our first American tour, there were actual picket lines and news crews at three of the gigs. It was the typical motley alliance of housewives and lesbians at the picket line. Housewives offended by the concept of punk rock and lesbians offended by the concept of rape. The really annoying thing was that the majority of the people on the picket line were precisely the kind of people that we would have liked at the gig, people that politically basically think like we do. But sometimes people are so dead set on being stupid that they won't allow themselves to experience something themselves. That's all part of the natural selection process that determines the audience of a band, and I can't really say if that's good or bad.”
It would be a few years before Albini returned to recording his own music, but that’s only because he was knee-deep in recording and engineering music for other artists, having begun that side of his career in earnest in 1988, mostly notably on the Pixies’ Surfer Rosa and Urge Overkill’s Jesus Urge Superstar. The following year found him working with the Poster Children, the Jesus Lizard, Pussy Galore, and Boss Hog, and as he entered the 1990s, he’d cemented his position as a go-to engineer, a term he pointedly preferred over “producer,” manning the boards for the Breeders, Tad, Pigface, Cath Carroll, the Didjits, the Wedding Present, Superchunk, Helmet, P.J. Harvey, and the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, among many, many others.
In 1993, however, came the album that made Albini something approximating a household name even amongst mainstream music fans: Nirvana’s In Utero.
Albini was so widely tipped to produce Nirvana’s follow-up to Nevermind that – in advance of him actually being contacted by the band – he actually sent a disclaimer to the UK music press to assure them that it was only a rumor. Of course, as luck would have it, it was only a few days later that he was contacted by Nirvana’s management, but even though he was familiar with the band, he wasn’t really a fan, and as he later told author Michael Azerrad in his book Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana, one of the reasons he took the gig was because he felt sorry for them.
“The position they were in, there was a bunch of bigwig music industry scum whose fortunes depended on Nirvana making hit records,” said Albini. “It seemed obvious to me that fundamentally they were the same sort of people as all the small-fry bands I deal with. They were basically punk rock fans, they’re people that were in a band that came p from an independent scene and it was sort of a fluke that they got famous.
“It seemed that they understood doing things the way I usually do them and they would appreciate making a record like that,” he continued. “But if I didn’t do it, they weren’t going to be allowed to make a record like that by the record company or by anyone else who worked with them. Any other producer that would work with Nirvana, for a start, would rob them, would want to get a lot of money out of them. And they’d probably be banking on making a hit record, in which case he would be making a record that he thought fit the mold of the hit singles record, not a powerful, personal punk rock record, which is the sort of record I got the impression they wanted to make.”
With the amount of acclaim and press Albini received from his work on In Utero, he received a plethora of production opportunities, and while he certainly took advantage of plenty of them, he’d also gotten back into making music, having founded a new band called Shellac in 1992. Originally an informal collaboration between Albini and drummer Todd Trainer, it quickly became a proper band, with bassist Bob Weston joining the group, and they released their debut album, At Action Park, in 1994.
Although the band was relatively prolific at first, releasing three albums between 1994 and 2000 (the other two being 1998’s Terraform and 2000’s 1000 Hurts), their fourth album, the critically acclaimed Excellent Italian Greyhound, didn’t arrive until 2007, at which point they went another seven years before releasing another LP (2014’s Dude Incredible).
Even though the band were inactive in the studio for a number of years after Dude Incredible, they toured the US as recently as 2022, and they also did a handful of shows in June 2023 in Spain and Portugal. As noted above, however, Shellac was on the cusp of releasing a new album, To All Trains, at the time of Albini’s death, with the band having made plans to tour behind the LP upon its release.
In order to honor Albini's legacy, we've begun the process of compiling a playlist featuring songs that were engineered, produced, or mixed by the man, and if you aren't familiar with just how much studio work Albini did over the course of his career, the fact that this contains 135 songs - only one per release - and only covers the years 1987-2000 and only includes the stuff that's on Spotify, you kind of get a feel for what a workaholic he was.
Give it a spin, and get educated.
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