Steve Albini, Engineer-Producer of Nirvana, Pixies Albums, Dies at 61

Steve Albini, the exacting producer/engineer and frontman of the noisesome indie rock bands Shellac and Big Black, has died. He was 61.

According to a staff member at Albini’s Electric Audio Recordings studio in Chicago, Albini died of a heart attack on Tuesday night.

Though he disdained the term “producer,” preferring “engineer” instead, Albini said in a 2018 interview that worked on more than 2,000 albums, mostly for underground or indie bands, but also notably on projects by two of the most important and influential bands of the late 1980s and early 1990s.

In addition to recording Nirvana’s final full studio album, 1993’s In Utero, he also worked on the beloved 1988 album Surfer Rosa by one of late Nirvana singer Kurt Cobain’s favorite bands, the Pixies. Constantly toggling between albums by A-list major label acts (PJ Harvey’s lashing 1993 album Rid of Me, Bush’s Razorblade Suitcase) and beloved indie bands from his native Chicago (Urge Overkill, The Jesus Lizard, Tar), Albini was also a prolific musician in his own right with a series of hardcore and noise bands, including Big Black, Rapeman and Shellac.

Born in Pasadena, Calif. on July 22, 1962, Albini positioned himself as a staunch outsider in the mainstream music industry, which he considered exploitative, refusing to accept the traditional producer royalties for any of the albums he recorded at his Chicago studio.

Punk rock in the purest sense of the word — anti-authoritarian, not at all afraid to offend (see the above-noted name of one of his bands, which he later said was a “flippant” choice that was indefensible), proudly pugnacious and principled to a fault — Albini made righteously non-commercial, ear-stabbing noise with his groups, but also eschewed the traditional trappings of the music industry on purpose. Big Black, whose sound mixed guttural, distorted vocals, pounding industrial drums and buzzing guitars, never had a manager, booked their own tours and broke up on the eve of their second album’s release. Albini was also adamant about preferring to receive no credit in album liner notes, but when he was named he requested “recording engineer” instead of producer.

Cobain was determined to record with Albini for his band’s second major-label album because of the stripped-down, raw sound he famously captured on his earlier productions, even though his label was firmly against hiring him, fearing a retreat from the band’s mega-platinum-selling loud-quiet-loud sound. For a while, though, he was equally well-known for his often eviscerating, rude broadsides against what he saw as phonies in the industry, including an infamous letter to Chicago Reader critic Bill Wyman in 1994 in which he labeled the Smashing Pumpkins “ultimately insignificant” and Liz Phair a “f–king chore to listen to” in a column titled “Three Pandering Sluts and their Music-Press Stooge.”

As noted in a 2023 Guardian profile, Albini reveled in eye poking, sometimes performing the Big Black song “Jordan Minnesota” about a purported child-sex ring in that town while pretending to be one of the victims being assaulted. He also briefly fronted a band called “Run N—er Run,” who released a 1985 single entitled “Pray I Don’t Kill You Faggot,” a song the provocateur told the paper he was embarrassed by, saying “I don’t expect any grace from anybody about that.”

Though he sometimes lashed out at bands he’d previously worked with — including once describing the Pixies as “four cows more anxious to be led around by their nose rings” — Albini’s indie bona fides and no BS nature kept him busy working on albums by a who’s who of underground 1990s acts from Jawbreaker to Silkworm, Brise-Glace, Killdozer, Gastr del Sol, Smog, Pansy Division and Low, among many others.

Despite sometimes claiming he would work with anyone who could scratch together the fee for his studio time, Albini’s early 2000s output was equally impressive and expansive, recording dozens of albums and singles by the likes of Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Man or Astro-Man?, Zeni Geva, Robbie Fulks, Mogwai, Flogging Molly, The Breeders, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Cheap Trick, Gogol Bordello, Joanna Newsome, The Stooges, Manic Street Preachers and many more.

For a time Albini became as well-known for his often cutting comments and unsparingly bald attacks on what he saw as the bloated music industry and groups he considered talent-deficient, but in a 2021 Twitter spree he apologized for some of his past comments, coming to terms with the hurt caused by what he’d considered principled stances.

“A lot of things I said and did from an ignorant position of comfort and privilege are clearly awful and I regret them. It’s nobody’s obligation to overlook that, and I do feel an obligation to redeem myself… A project I’ve undertaken piecemeal as I’ve matured, evolved and learned over time. I expect no grace, and honestly feel like I and others of my generation have not been held to task enough for words and behavior that ultimately contributed to a coarsening society.”

He continued the mea culpa, taking responsibility for inspiring what he deemed “edgelord s–t,” writing, “For myself and many of my peers, we miscalculated. We thought the major battles over equality and inclusiveness had been won, and society would eventually express that, so we were not harming anything with contrarianism, shock, sarcasm or irony. If anything, we were trying to underscore the banality, the everyday nonchalance toward our common history with the atrocious, all while laboring under the tacit mistaken notion that things were getting better… Believe me, I’ve met my share of punishers at gigs and I sympathize with anybody who isn’t me but still had to suffer them.”

Shellac were poised to release their first album in a decade, To All Trains, next week, and had booked a series of shows in England in June, followed by a run of U.S. dates in Chicago, New York and Los Angeles in July.

Often working on dozens of albums per year, Albini — also an award-winning poker player — kept up his torrid pace recently, re-teaming with frequent collaborator folk singer Nina Nastasia in 2022, as well as working on albums by Black Midi, Spare Snare, Liturgy and Code Orange over the past two years.

This story first appeared on Billboard.com.