Steve Albini, acclaimed Nirvana, Pixies and PJ Harvey producer, dead at 61

Steve Albini, the prolific musician, producer and audio engineer, has died. He was 61.

Albini fronted the underground rock bands Big Black and Shellac, but was perhaps best known for his production and engineering work on classic albums including Nirvana’s In Utero, Pixies’ Surfer Rosa and PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me.

He passed away last night (7 May) from a heart attack, staff at Electrical Audio – the Chicago recording studio he founded in 1997 – confirmed to The Independent.

Albini was born in Pasadena, California in 1962 before his family moved to the college town of Missoula, Montana in 1974.

As a teenager he started playing bass guitar while recovering from a broken leg, and developed a deep fascination with punk music after being introduced to the first Ramones album.

He received a degree in journalism from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, and put it to use writing for punk rock zines in and around Chicago.

In 1981, Albini formed the heavy punk rock band Big Black, singing and playing guitar along with guitarist Santiago Durango and bassist Jeff Pezzati. They released their debut album Atomizer in 1986 and influential follow-up Songs About F***ing the following year.

From the mid-1980s, Albini began working as a record producer although he disliked the term and preferred to either receive no credit or be referred to as a “recording engineer”.

The raw, unfiltered sound that Albini captured on the 1988 Pixies album Surfer Rosa and the Breeders’ Pod in 1990 brought him to the attention of Kurt Cobain, who sought him out to work on Nirvana’s third and final studio album In Utero in 1993.

He was incredibly industrious as an engineer, estimating in 2018 that he had worked on thousands of records by the likes of Mogwai, Jimmy Page & Robert Plant and Joanna Newsom.

In 1992, Albini formed Shellac, a noise rock band who released five albums between 1994 and 2014. Their sixth album To All Trains, their first in a decade, is set to be released next week.

As well as his prodigious output, Albini was also known for his outspoken opposition to the corporate music industry.

In 2015, the electronic producer Powell put up a massive billboard in Shoreditch, East London which displayed an email from Albini expressing his hatred for dance music.

Powell, whose full name is Oscar Powell, had approached Albini about sampling Big Black for his single “Insomniac”.

Albini replied:

Hey Oscar,

Sounds like you’ve got a cool thing set up for yourself. I am absolutely the wrong audience for this kind of music. I’ve always detested mechanised dance music, its stupid simplicity, the clubs where it was played, the people who went to those clubs, the drugs they took, the s**t they liked to talk about, the clothes they wore, the battles they fought amongst each other…

Basically all of it: 100 percent hated every scrap.

The electronic music I liked was radical and different, s**t like the White Noise, Xenakis, Suicide, Kraftwerk, and the earliest stuff form Cabaret Voltaire, SPK and DAF. When that scene and those people got co-opted by dance/club music I felt like we’d lost a war. I detest club culture as deeply as I detest anything on earth. So I am against what you’re into, and an enemy of where you come from but I have no problem with what you’re doing…

In other words, you’re welcome to do whatever you like with whatever of mine you’ve gotten your hands on. Don’t care. Enjoy yourself.

Steve