Steve Albini has died at the age of 61. Shellac frontman and Nirvana engineer.
Steve Albini, a leading light of sound and morality in independent rock, leader of Big Black and Shellac and recording engineer for Nirvana, PJ Harvey and many other artists, died at the age of 61.
The news was confirmed to Variety. on Wednesday, Taylor Hales, who works at Albini’s Chicago recording studio, Electronic Audio; the cause of death was a heart attack.
Steve Albini first rose to prominence in the early 1980s as the frontman of Chicago trio Big Black, known for aggressive guitar-driven rock that used a drum machine rather than a live drummer, a rarity at the time. Yet he was also known for his equally aggressive criticism of musicians and others who he believed were in it for the money or popularity rather than the music – and he walked it like he talked it. He disdained the term “producer”, although he supposedly did on many recordings, and claimed a “recorded by Steve Albini” credit. He also refused to take “points” – ie. royalties, a financial bonus common to most major producers – from the recordings he worked on.
His sometimes iconoclastic attitude — and his evocative work on the Pixies’ landmark 1988 album Surfer Rosa — endeared him to Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain, who insisted that the band collaborate with Albin on his label’s second album in 1993. .”In Utero” was much to the chagrin of their label, who were hoping for another speaker-shaking hit similar to the band’s “Nevermind.” (“In Utero” was pretty loud, but not in the radio-friendly way they were going for.) Around the same time, Steve Albini also recorded PJ Harvey’s sophomore track “Rid of Me,” which had a similarly aggressive sound.
Steve Albini too worked with acts such as the Breeders, Slint, Protective cap, the Jesus Reptile, Jon Spencer, the Grimy Three and indeed previous Driven Blimp individuals Jimmy Page and Robert Plant on their 1998 collection “Walking Into Clarksdale.” The last mentioned collection in specific profited from Albini’s save, no-frills sound, which was at chances with the duo’s expand latter-day recordings.
Within the early 1990s Steve Albini shaped the band Shellac, which discharged five studio collections over the a long time and was planning for a visit afterward this year to bolster their 6th full-length — and to begin with in a decade — “To All Trains,” which is planned for discharge following week.
He was too the originator, proprietor and vital build at Electrical Sound, a recording studio complex in Chicago. Indeed presently, Steve Albini was still reliably taking up generation gigs for a level charge, denying eminence installments in a appear of bolster with his indie craftsmen.
Steve Albini was born in Pasadena, California on July 22, 1962. His family moved frequently before settling in Missoula, Montana, where Albini discovered the Ramones as a teenager. While studying journalism in Illinois, he became part of Chicago’s vibrant punk-rock scene, which he never left.
He began recording under the name Big Black in 1981 and played almost every instrument on the group’s dense first release, the 1982 EP Lungs. The lineup centered around Steve Albini, guitarist Santiago Durango and bassist Jeff Pezzat and the group. They quickly became popular and active in the growing American indie rock scene, releasing three EPs and two full-length albums before disbanding in 1987. Although Albini and the band were sometimes seen as iconoclastic and judgmental—and often were, especially when Albini was writing for fans like Matter—their music was a major influence on left-field hard rock for decades to come, beginning with Godflesh. From the 80s to today at idle; 80’s band Head of David released their debut album with the track “Big Black Sabbath”.
Moreover regularly ignored was the band’s sense of humor — their last collection was called “Songs Around Fucking”; their final single highlighted covers of melodies by Kraftwerk and Cheap Trap and its sleeve appeared the band comically dressed as those craftsmen — but a few endeavors at humor did not arrive well:
Albini’s to begin with post-Big Dark band bore the sad title of Rapeman, which he afterward lamented. Whereas he contended that the amusing expectation of his verses for melodies with titles utilizing profoundly hostile terms — not to specify a limited-edition Enormous Dark collection cover with an dissection photo of a suicide by gunfire impact — ought to be self-evident, that refinement certainly was not continuously clear at to begin with impression. He conceded as much afterward in life.
“A parcel of things I said and did from an uninformed position of consolation and benefit are clearly terrible and I lament them. It’s nobody’s commitment to miss that, and I do feel an commitment to recover myself,” Albini composed on X (once Twitter) in 2021. “If anything, we were attempting to emphasize the triviality, the ordinary apathy toward our common history with the terrible, all whereas laboring beneath the implied mixed up idea that things were getting superior. I’m past due for a discussion approximately my part in motivating ‘edgelord’ shit. Accept me, I’ve met my share of punishers at gigs and I sympathize with anyone who isn’t me but still had to endure them.”
Around the same time he found success with Nirvana and PJ Harvey, he formed Shellac with bassist Bob Weston and drummer Todd Trainer. The band recorded and toured extensively in the 1990s and 2000s. In later years, Albini established himself in Chicago, working indiscriminately with most artists who wanted it, touring and releasing albums with Shellac, and became a very successful professional poker player. In 2018, he won a World Series of Poker gold bracelet with more than $105,000 in prize money – and four years later, he doubled the prize with another win.