Steve Albini, the record producer and engineer behind generation-defining rock albums by Nirvana, Pixies and PJ Harvey, died Tuesday. He was 61 years old.
A representative for Electrical Audio, Albini's recording studio in Chicago, confirmed Albini's death following a heart attack on Tuesday. The representative did not have any further statements or a list of survivors available.
Albini was a giant of punk and experimental rock music from the 80s to the present. He produced (or as he preferred to call his work, “engineered”) Nirvana's final studio album, “In Utero,” selected by the band for its raw, uncompromising aesthetic. Albums like the Pixies' “Surfer Rosa” and PJ Harvey's “Rid of Me” felt bracing and dangerous then, and continue to inspire young rockers today with their seething energy and defiance of audio-pop conventions.
“I got exactly one phone call about a No. 1 record,” Albini told The Times in 1993. “It shows how pack the big-label people are. Everyone thinks the same thing: 'That Albini is a problem.' Stay away.'”
Albini, raised in Missoula, Montana, was the son of a rocket scientist father and inherited his engineer's meticulousness. The young Albini, intelligent and disenchanted with the local conservative culture, discovered punk through music magazines and found a safe harbor for misfits. After moving to Chicago to study journalism at Northwestern University, he rose to fame as an artist in the lurid groups Big Black and Shellac, which emerged from the fertile post-hardcore underground alongside bands like Sonic Youth, Butthole Surfers and the Minutemen.
Growling and sneering through big glasses, but as ambitious and incorruptible as he was abrasive, Albini became an underground star. “How many kids want to be whipped by Steve Albini's guitar?” Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth told the Village Voice in 1988.
“Big Black introduced one of the indie world's most notable characters,” Michael Azerrad wrote in the definitive biography of the indie-punk scene, “Our Band Could Be Your Life.” “A person who would define not only the sound of underground music for the next two decades, but also the speech of it: the irascible, outspoken, intelligent and relentlessly ethical Steve Albini.”
Shellac in particular was a formative influence on countless punk, metal, electronic and noise bands. The group's 1994 LP, “At Action Park,” was a brutal reading of post-punk, with its minimalist but seething power-trio instrumentation slithering with menace.
Albini combined his dedication to the most vicious and dazzling sounds possible with professional professionalism as a producer at his studio, Electrical Audio. He was famous for wearing a mechanic-style jumpsuit on sessions, an overt gesture of how he viewed his role.
“I've always had a pretty standard approach,” he said of his recording techniques. “I have a direct, documentary approach to recording music, and I've never been tempted with my own bands or someone else's band to suddenly become production-happy. If you let the band sound natural, then the record will sink or swim on its own merits. … The things I like most about rock bands are simplicity and directness, and those principles guide my recordings.”
He was a fierce defender of artists. A famous essay in the Baffler, “The Trouble with Music,” exposed the perfidies of the major-label system, then still in a post-Nirvana frenzy that fed young rock artists.
“Whenever I talk to a band that's about to sign to a major label, I always end up thinking about them in a particular context,” Albini wrote. “I imagine a trench, about four feet wide and five feet deep, maybe sixty yards long, filled with liquid, decomposing shit. I imagine these people, some of them good friends, others barely acquaintances, at one end of this trench. I also imagine a faceless industry lackey on the other end, holding a fountain pen and a contract waiting to be signed.”
“In Utero,” Nirvana’s follow-up to the landmark “Nevermind,” bridged the gap between the underground music Kurt Cobain loved and the expectations placed on the world’s biggest band. “I'm uncomfortable with this new world of Nirvana fame,” drummer Dave Grohl said in an interview last year. “When things got huge, we all held on to the things we felt most attached to. “We had always listened to the records Steve had made.”
Albini's catalog spans decades of fierce, fearless rock and experimental records, from Slint and Jesus Lizard to Low, Mogwai and Joanna Newsom. He wrote and recorded until his death. Shellac was about to tour his first album in a decade, “To All Trains,” which will be released next week.
“What matters to me is that I do things in a way that I think is (for lack of a better word) right,” Albini told The Times. “Everything I do, I do with basically the same goal: I want to make better and cheaper punk-rock records today than yesterday.”
