The legendary producer and musician, who died this week at age 61, believed in a better music industry—and a better version of himself
Steve Albini produced one of the greatest albums in rock history, and he wanted everyone to know that he hated it.
“A patchwork pinch loaf from a band who at their top dollar best are blandly entertaining college rock” was how he described the Pixies’ 1988 debut, Surfer Rosa, which he helmed. “Their willingness to be ‘guided’ by their manager, their record company and their producers is unparalleled. Never have I seen four cows more anxious to be led around by their nose rings.”
It was 1991, and Albini was—by choice!—writing this for the magazine Forced Exposure, within a column detailing his thoughts on various albums he had worked on. As Albini explained before his “pinch loaf” diatribe, potential future slander was literally part of the deal with him. “When I am hired to record a band,” Albini wrote, “I make it plain to my clients that I do not wish to be associated with their charming little records. I will do a good job for them, but that does not include shouldering any responsibility for their lousy tastes and mistakes.”
In time, Albini, who died on Tuesday at 61 from a heart attack, would soften his stance on Surfer Rosa. But the lore of Albini’s propensity for scorched-earth comments—often directed at the music industry as a machine, but often at other musicians—isn’t something that can be revised. It’s doubtful he would want it to be, either.
In the same way that Albini believed in capturing the sound of a band in its simplest and most honest form, he seemed to also believe in engaging with the press in as candid a way as possible. It’s unclear whether he was regularly offering a window into the dizzying world inside his head as a privilege or a punishment. It was, after all, the same twisted head that wrote a Big Black song about a child sex ring, or that named one of his other groups Rapeman. Quite often, what was rattling inside his bespectacled noggin was pure disdain or anger—or at the very least just some desire to provoke. And Albini was fine with sharing that, and accepted the consequences. By the end of his life, anyway, he was quite aware of how absurd he was often being.
“you can make an eclipse any time by holding up your thumn,” he wrote last month on Bluesky, having already become too much of a hater of X to stay on that platform in the Elon Musk era. “I can wreck anything I’m that guy. don’t get me started on bottled water. bike lanes. anything really, just don’t get me started.”
There is some irony to the fact that a world-class hater like Albini—someone who, if his old roommate is to be believed, used to literally answer the phone with “Fuck you!”—also lived his life under a strict moral code. The most obvious way this code manifested itself was that Albini would effectively negotiate himself out of money before starting any project, rejecting the industry norm of producers taking a percentage of an album’s future profits. As he saw it, an album is the band’s creative work, and his job was only to help them manifest it.
“I would like to be paid like a plumber,” he told Nirvana in an “are you sure you want to do this” letter, before agreeing to produce what would be their 1993 album, In Utero. Albini, who once dismissed Nirvana as “R.E.M. with a fuzzbox” (as if that’s a bad thing), estimated at the time that he was leaving $400,000 on the table, assuming the record would sell 3 million copies. He was wrong on that; In Utero ended up selling 15 million copies, meaning he missed out on a few million. “There’s no fucking way I would ever take that much money,” he said of the $400,000. “I wouldn’t be able to sleep.”
It’s not like the guy was loaded in some other way. Albini’s bands—Big Black, Rapeman, and Shellac most prominent among them—never had anything resembling a hit song or record, and he came from modest means. According to a 1994 Chicago magazine profile, Albini’s father was the first in his family to complete any amount of formal schooling, which he miraculously did with doctorates in mathematics and aerodynamics, as well as a master’s in philosophy. (He became an engineer notable for his work in the modeling of forest fires.) Albini’s mother was described as “an archetype of a Rockwellian caregiver” who would invite parolees to holiday dinners and fostered Vietnamese and Laotian children.
Albini entered college with a surprisingly idealistic goal: He wanted to become a journalist because “on a fundamental level I thought writing down what happens now is important for the future,” he said on Marc Maron’s WTF podcast in 2015. His heroes were Woodward, Bernstein, and the Ramones. The Ramones ended up winning out in time, but the journalistic impulse persisted in Albini’s creation of zines, and ultimately in the way he approached music.
In that letter to Nirvana, Albini laid out his mindset of capturing artists as they are, rather than dolling them up to be something they’re not. “I like to leave room for accidents or chaos,” he wrote. “Making a seamless record, where every note and syllable is in place and every bass drum is identical, is no trick. Any idiot with the patience and the budget to allow such foolishness can do it.”
It’s easy to gloss over how brazen it was to insist on this for a band following up Nevermind, one of the biggest records ever released—which, notably, is a seamless record, where every note and syllable is in place. Nevermind producer Butch Vig layered the instruments over and over—and while the results are undeniable, Kurt Cobain would later say he was “embarrassed” by the sound of it. (“It’s closer to a Mötley Crüe record than it is a punk rock record,” he said.) In Utero, with its jagged notes and shrill feedback left delightfully high in the mix, was a kick in the ass to the higher-ups at Nirvana’s DGC Records, who felt that the album was “unreleasable,” according to Albini. (Nirvana eventually allowed for some remixing to be done on the record before it was released.) What Albini demanded of Nirvana was nothing short of a full-fledged attack on the powers that be.
In the wake of In Utero, Albini temporarily had trouble finding more production work. Talking to The Guardian last year, he said that his profile had become too high for the lower-end bands and too risky for more major-label work, leaving him in a limbo. Pissing off DGC did not come without a price. “That was direct fallout from [major labels] blaming me for Nirvana getting uppity,” Albini said.
Given his tendency to hate on everything from the Pixies to bike lanes, it’s reasonable to closely consider the motivations behind Albini’s instinct to make enemies in the music industry. But according to him, his decisions as a producer were purely a reflection of what he thought was best from a musical standpoint—a reflection of that journalistic impulse to document with impartiality, catering only to what he saw and heard in front of him.
“It’s like if you see a beautiful woman,” Albini told Maron, “and she’s wearing a pink frock and has lipstick on. And then you see a grizzly bear and you think, ‘Well, maybe I should put lipstick and a dress on the bear.’ All you’re gonna do is piss off that bear.”
This approach explains why there is no obvious Albini Sound. In the records that Albini has produced—or, as he’d prefer to say, engineered—you have to look for a through line of truthfulness, a lack of gimmicks, a clarity of vision, even if that vision ends up manifesting itself as something distorted and gnarled.
Often, when you look at an Albini production within an act’s discography, it’s the record that could have been self-titled—the record that serves as an encapsulation of who the artist really is, without necessarily tapping into the commercial potential that they could, theoretically, tap into: the Breeders’ Pod, PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me, Jawbreaker’s 24 Hour Revenge Therapy, Songs: Ohia’s The Magnolia Electric Co. Like a good journalist at work, he sought accuracy, but still found a way to inject his own personality in the margins. He was searching for how the story of the music should best be told, for the truth. There’s a reason he became a world-class poker player: He could look at anyone and tell if they were bluffing.
Always an analog purist when it came to music, Albini was surprisingly adept at and welcoming to the online world. He ran a cooking blog and shitposted with abandon. (“Christ the amount of human effort wasted to sound like an SNL band warm up,” he wrote of his nemesis Steely Dan.) In some ways, the internet and its lack of barriers made it clear that he was just as prickly as he ever was when it came to certain topics, like electronic music. (“I detest club culture as deeply as I detest anything on earth.”)
All of which made Albini’s recent mea culpa in the press, in which he earnestly atoned for his previous “edgelord” tendencies, an almost shockingly mature turn from someone who once called Urge Overkill “weiners in suits playing frat party rock, trying to tap a goofy trend that doesn’t even exist.” (OK, that one’s still pretty funny, especially considering the band has been called his one-time “pet project.”) In some sense, Albini’s contrition was the act of a premier hater realizing that the final frontier of hating is one’s own past. But it was also a welcome way for Albini to show that people can continue to grow at any age—and it set the stage for him to continue to grow as a producer as well. For that next chapter to be cut so drastically short—for him to die so suddenly, just a week before a new Shellac record is to be released—is difficult to accept.
As the musical world has become increasingly cash-strapped, Albini’s affordable, efficient recording services were more enticing than ever. That explains why some of the best Albini productions (like Cloud Nothings’ Attack on Memory and Sunn O)))’s Life Metal and Pyroclasts) have come in his later years—an extremely uncommon feat for a producer several decades into their career.
One recent project that stands out is Ty Segall’s 2017 self-titled album, which is, indeed, as good a summary of Segall’s sprawling career as one could get. Out of dozens of various Segall releases, the casual genre hopping of Ty Segall offers the most distilled essence of one of indie rock’s most enigmatic figures; it looks straight into the eyes of someone who has moved so fast over the years that it’s often been difficult to get a good look at him. For his services, Albini received a flat fee, like a plumber.
To promote that album, there was some plumbing involved, as it happens. In a video posted by Segall’s label, Drag City, Albini—clad in a navy jumpsuit, like a custodian—pushes a toilet off a ledge on what appears to be the loading area of Electrical Audio, his studio in Chicago. The toilet shatters, and then Segall jumps in with an axe, smashing the rest to bits. Albini, having engineered this scene for Segall to seize upon, gazes on the ruins and flashes a thumbs up. Another job well done.
Nate Rogers is a writer in Los Angeles. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Stereogum, and elsewhere.