Remembering Steve Albini (1962–2024)
If indie rock’s biggest a-hole can change, there’s hope for us all
In the summer of 1984, my wife Charity’s younger brother Chris died suddenly. For the next couple of years, her favorite band was Big Black. “Favorite” is maybe not the right word: it’s more like their aggressively abrasive mix of dual-guitar noise and inhuman drum-machine beats was the music she needed, a kind of catharsis-through-pain that saw her through an extended emotional tailspin. She says that according to setlist.fm, she saw them three times in the space of a little over two years.
After Big Black broke up in 1987, leader Steve Albini — who died of a heart attack in his adopted hometown of Chicago on May 7, 2024 at the age of 61 — shifted his focus into engineering. (He hated the term “producer,” for reasons we’ll get into, and routinely asked for the credit “Recorded by Steve Albini.”) He was behind the board for a string of indie classics by Pixies, The Wedding Present, The Jesus Lizard, The Breeders, Superchunk, Palace, and PJ Harvey before his high-profile gig on Nirvana’s In Utero started bringing names like Jimmy Page and Robert Plant, Cheap Trick, and Nine Inch Nails into his address book. Even then, Albini kept a policy of recording anyone who asked him to, which is how his CV includes two great acoustic albums by western…
