Steve Albini, the noise rock pioneer with Big Black and Shellac who also helped engineer some of the greatest alternative rock albums of all time — Nirvana’s In Utero and Pixies’ Surfer Rosa among them — has died at the age of 61.
Staff at Albini’s Electrical Audio Recording confirmed to Rolling Stone that Albini died Tuesday night, though no other details were provided.
Albini’s death comes just a week after his acclaimed noise rock project Shellac was set to release To All Trains, their first new album in over a decade.
The California-born, Montana-raised Albini played in Missoula punk bands as a teenager before moving to Chicago in the late Seventies to attend Northwestern University, where he majored in journalism and wrote for local music zines. On the side, Albini formed his own solo music project that he dubbed Big Black, releasing the EP Lungs in 1981.
After filling out Big Black with guitarist Santiago Durango and bassist Jeff Pezzati — both of the beloved Chicago punk act Naked Raygun — with a Roland TR-606 as the drummer, the band released a series of EPs that showcased Big Black’s trademark sound: Suffocating, abrasive guitars, played slower than punk rock but no less intense.
In 1986, Big Black, now with Dave Riley on bass, released their debut album Atomizer, followed a year later by second and most enduring LP, the post-hardcore classic Songs About Fucking, released on the Chicago indie label Touch & Go.
“All the people that work in music, even in the independent music business, give you the impression that they are iconoclasts and that they are unconcerned with commercial considerations,” Albini told Rolling Stone of the album title in a 2017 interview celebrating its 30th anniversary.
“They want you to think that they are in it for art and art alone. Then when you present them with something that is unmarketable or that might not reach all of the chain stores – when you present them with something that is a manifestation of their pretense – they blanch. So we were gonna put everybody on the rack. ‘Oh, your record label is about the unfettered free expression of the artist? OK, we will give you an obscene album title and horrible music, and let’s see if you live up to your word.’”
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Albini added, “The term ‘rock & roll music’ originally meant dirty songs about fucking,” he says. “It was rhythmic songs that were euphemistically or explicitly about fucking. Songs about fucking – that’s what rock & roll meant.”
After the two highly influential albums, Big Black broke up in 1987, with Albini briefly forming the noise rock outfit Rapeman — which released one LP in 1988 and split soon after — before focusing his efforts on the recording studio and bringing his noisy approach to production to other artists’ music.
After TKTK his craft in the studio with Chicago-area acts like Urge Overkill, Albini was enlisted to produce (though Albini himself preferred the word “engineer”) an album by a relatively unknown Boston band called Pixies. Released in 1988, Surfer Rosa was an instant cult hit and helped launch the alternative rock revolution that would take over the mainstream in the early Nineties.
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“The brainy Boston quartet went up against punk producer Steve Albini for one of the era’s most influential rock sounds: all razor-blade guitars and drum thud,” Rolling Stone wrote in naming Surfer Rosa one of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. “It became the sound of the Nineties, as everyone from Nirvana to PJ Harvey went to Albini, hoping to get the raw power of Surfer Rosa.”
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