Steve Albini, influential record producer and musician, dies at age 61
Steve Albini, the record producer and engineer behind generation-defining rock albums by Nirvana, the Pixies and PJ Harvey, died Tuesday. He was 61.
A representative for Electrical Audio, Albini’s Chicago recording studio, confirmed Albini’s death following a heart attack on Tuesday. The representative did not have available a further statement or a list of survivors.
Albini was a giant of punk and experimental rock music from the ’80s to the present day. He produced (or as he preferred to call his job, “engineered”) Nirvana’s final studio album, “In Utero,” selected by the band for his 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 for their seething energy and defiance of pop audio convention.
“I’ve gotten exactly one phone call out of a No. 1 record,” Albini told The Times in 1993. “It shows how packlike these major-label people are. They all think the same thing: ‘That Albini guy is trouble. Stay away.’”
Albini, raised in Missoula, Montana, was the son of a rocket scientist father and inherited his engineer’s meticulousness. The young Albini, smart and disenchanted with the local conservative culture, discovered punk through music magazines and found safe harbor for misfits. After moving to Chicago to attend Northwestern University for journalism, he rose to scene prominence as an artist in the scabrous groups Big Black and Shellac, which emerged from the fertile post-hardcore underground alongside bands like Sonic Youth, Butthole Surfers and the Minutemen.
Snarling and sneering through big horn-rim glasses, yet just as ambitious and uncorruptable as he was abrasive, Albini became a star in the underground. “How many boys want to be whipped by Steve Albini’s guitar?” Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon told the Village Voice in 1988.
“Big Black introduced one of the indie world’s foremost characters,” wrote Michael Azerrad in the definitive indie-punk scene biography, “Our Band Could Be Your Life.” “A person who would define not just the sound of underground music through the next two decades, but also its discourse — the irascible, outspoken, intelligent and relentlessly ethical Steve Albini.”
Albini paired his dedication to the most vicious, arresting sounds possible with a workmanlike professionalism as a producer in his studio, Electrical Audio. He was famous for wearing a mechanic-style jumpsuit to sessions, an overt gesture at how he saw his role.
“I’ve always had a fairly standard method,” he said of his recording techniques. “I have a straightforward, documentary approach to recording music, and I’ve never been tempted with my own bands or with anyone else’s band to suddenly go production-happy. If you let the band sound natural, then the record will sink or swim on its own merits.”