Steve Albini: Remembering the pioneering alt-rock producer in his own words

“If you have a valid set of working principles, you can do it on your own terms and never have to kiss anybody’s ass.” Steve Albini, The Guardian, 2023.

Born in 1962 in Pasadena, California, Albini discovered bands like The Ramones as a teenager – and was later repeatedly fired from his Northwestern University campus radio station in Illinois for playing obnoxious, loud music during the early morning time slot. He immersed himself in Chicago’s dynamic punk scene during his studies, attending shows by The Replacements and Hüsker Dü before forming his own hardcore outfit, Big Black, in 1981. Known for their explicit lyrics, searing guitars, and propulsive drum machines, the band would deliver genre classics ”Atomizer“ and “Songs About Fucking” in 1986-1987, with their “hideous music” foreshadowing the emergence of industrial rock bands like Nine Inch Nails in the years thereafter.

“Big Black was a reaction against the traditional sound and form of a rock band, a negation of tradition and rejection of orthodoxy,” Albini told Fevers of the Mind in 2023. Indeed, the band was known for eschewing tradition by forgoing management, tour booking agents, and even proper recording contracts, and opting instead to everything themselves. This fierce DIY ideology would endure throughout the rest of Albini’s career: “If you have a valid set of working principles,” he told The Guardian in 2023, “you can do it on your own terms and never have to kiss anybody’s ass.”

“Paying a royalty to a producer or engineer is ethically indefensible… I would like to be paid like a plumber: I do the job and you pay me what it’s worth.” Steve Albini, letter to Nirvana, 1992.

After Big Black’s disbandment, Albini would remain visible as a performing musician with bands like post-hardcore noise-rock outfit Shellac from the 90s onwards. But it was his transition into the producer role with bands like Slint and The Jesus Lizard that would cement his reputation in the music industry. His hands-off methods and caustic sounds drew him admiration, but his commitment to an egalitarian philosophy of “independence, self-determination [and] absolute total honesty” was pioneering. He’d take credit merely as a workmanlike ‘engineer’ so as to deflect any undeserved creative praise, and insisted on taking a fair flat fee as remuneration for his work – refusing to take royalties from the bands who hired him. “I would like to be paid like a plumber,” he claimed in an ethos-defining letter penned to Nirvana in 1992. “I do the job and you pay me what it’s worth.”

An early career breakthrough as ‘engineer’ came in 1988 via emerging college rock band Pixies. With urgent, dynamic-shifting tracks like “Bone Machine”, “Gigantic”, and the anthemic “Where Is My Mind?”, debut album “Surfer Rosa” drafted a new blueprint for alt-rock built around Albini’s raw production. The album became a calling card for him as dozens of artists sought his authentic-sounding craftsmanship; one notable fan was English musician PJ Harvey, who, much like Albini’s early-90s clients The Wedding Present, Fugazi and Superchunk, sought to emulate the gritty and abrasive presentation of “Surfer Rosa” for her sophomore album “Rid of Me” in 1993.

“If a record takes more than a week to make, somebody’s fucking up.” Steve Albini, 1992.

“His sound just sounds like a band. It doesn’t sound like it’s gone through a recording process or it’s coming out of speakers,” Harvey would tell MTV that year. “All I ever wanted is for us to sound like we do when we’re playing together in a room”. Albini’s uncanny ability to achieve this across the album was key to it’s urgent and rough-sounding character. And in keeping with Albini’s no-nonsense philosophy (which would often translate to highly limited numbers of takes during recording, and left plenty of space for accidents and mistakes) the bulk of recording took place over  just three days: “If a record takes more than a week to make,” Albini would later remark, “somebody’s fucking up.”

Within months of the “Rid of Me” sessions, Albini was back at the same studio – Pachyderm, in Cannon Falls, Minnesota – with one of the biggest bands of the era. Already a noted fan of Big Black, Kurt Cobain had cited the marriage of intense noise and pop found on “Surfer Rosa” as a key influence on Nirvana’s mainstream hit “Nevermind“ – and in its aftermath, the band sought to reject their own newfound fame by holing up with DIY-minded Albini (who was dismissive of the band’s commercial breakthrough) for its follow-up, “In Utero”. It would prove a controversial decision.

“Fuck other people. They’re not in the band. Just make music that stimulates you and don’t second-guess yourself.” Steve Albini Reddit AMA, 2012.

“I was quite proud of the job I did on that record before all the chaos started,” Albini told Australian radio station Triple J shortly after the release of “In Utero” in 1993. Tracks like “Scentless Apprentice” and “Serve the Servants” would indeed display the quintessential traits of any Albini recording: harsh distortion, intense vocals, clattering drums, and a powerful sense of immediacy. But the band’s record label was horrified with his bare-bones production style and “uncommercial” sound, and opted to take the likes of “Heart-Shaped Box” and “All Apologies” to be mixed elsewhere, against Albini’s wishes. “All the yelling and shouting and finger pointing and people saying that I‘d ruined their record [that ensued]… was a disgusting example of how control-happy the music industry is,” Albini continued. “I haven’t listened to it at all since it‘s been released.”

Indeed, Albini was an opinionated and outspoken figure throughout his career – notorious, particularly, for his incendiary diatribes in the Chicago music press. He’d come to regret describing Pixies as “four cows anxious to be led around by their nose rings” in a 1991 issue of Forced Exposure magazine, admitting in 2005 that “I don’t think that I regarded the band as significantly as I should have”. His essential 1993 essay ‘Problem with Music’, meanwhile, would liken the process of signing with a major label to struggling through “a trench… filled with runny, decaying shit”. And controversial letter to Chicago Reader music critic Bill Wyman a year later ripped into artists like Smashing Pumpkins and Liz Phair (and signed off with: “fuck you.”). Years later, he’d atone for his behaviour in a 2021 Twitter thread: “A lot of things I said and did from an ignorant position of comfort and privilege are clearly awful… It’s nobody’s obligation to overlook that, and I do feel an obligation to redeem myself.”

“Whenever I talk to a band who are about to sign with a major label… I imagine a trench, about four feet wide and five feet deep, maybe sixty yards long, filled with runny, decaying shit.” — Steve Albini, ‘Problem with Music’, 1993.

Despite claiming that the major labels were “absolutely through dealing with me” in the wake of the “In Utero” release, Albini remained steadfast in his work with artists from all walks of life – recording crucial albums by former Led Zeppelin members Jimmy Page and Robert Plant, indie band Low, and post-rock group Dirty Three in the late ‘90s. The latter – an avant-garde, violin-based outfit led by Warren Ellis, who would latterly become Nick Cave’s closest and most enduring collaborator – remains a solemn and mournful highlight. “We were lost in the middle of recording and about to give up,” wrote Ellis in an Instagram post this week. “Steve recognised the creative struggle: ‘Don’t forget what you came in here to do’.” 

Further creative high-points followed via work with Songs: Ohia (“The point is to do something that’s meaningful on more than one level,” Albini told Better Yet podcast of 2003 album The Magnolia Electric Co.); Canadian post-rockers Godspeed You! Black Emperor, and drone metal group Sunn O))). And in later years, even Leeds indie band The Cribs and Mercury Prize-nominated math-rockers Black Midi would seek his services – Pitchfork reports that, when he died on Tuesday, Albini still charged just $900 a day (less than a quarter of what someone with his credentials could command) for his work.

“The point is to do something that’s meaningful on more than one level.” Steve Albini, Better Yet podcast, 2019.

Albini still made headlines in his later career – memorably declaring that he “wanted to strangle” Odd Future in 2011 after spending 40 minutes in a minibus with the “little pricks” in Spain. And only six weeks ago, at a keynote speech at SXSW in Texas, he declared the festival “an affront to the way I think about music and culture… [and] easily the most toxic environment for music and culture that I’ve ever been in: 100 percent assholes.” But perhaps his most resonant remark is one shared with The Guardian last summer. 

“The recording part is the part that matters to me – that I’m making a document that records a piece of our culture, the life’s work of the musicians that are hiring me,” he told journalist Jeremy Gordon in 2023. “I want the music to outlive all of us.”