Steve Albini, the renowned musician and recording engineer behind the works of Nirvana, the Pixies, the Breeders, Jimmy Page and Robert Plant, among hundreds of others, died on May 7. He was 61 years old.
His death from a heart attack was confirmed by Taylor Hales of Electric Audio, the Chicago studio founded by Albini in the mid-’90s.
Albini, who was also a musician in the punk rock bands Big Black and Shellac, was a noted critic of the industry he worked in, often offering scathing comments about the artists who hired him.
He called Nirvana “a run-of-the-mill version of the Seattle sound” but took the production job on the group’s 1993 album, “In Utero.” Nirvana singer Kurt Cobain said at the time that he liked Albini’s technique of capturing natural sound in a recording room for an element of rawness. In a circulated letter that Albini wrote to the band before signing, he acknowledges that he wants to “put out a record in a few days.”
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Albini also refused to accept royalties from records he produced. As he writes in the Nirvana letter, “paying a royalty to a producer or engineer is ethically indefensible” and demands “to be paid like a plumber: I do the work and you tell me what it’s worth” .
Other albums featuring Albini as sound engineer include the Pixies’ “Surfer Rosa,” the Stooges’ “The Weirdness,” Robbie Fulks’ “Country Love Songs” and Plant and Page’s “Walking Into Clarksdale.”
Albini was an unapologetic student of analog recording, dismissing digital in harsh terms and hated the term “producer”, preferring “recording engineer”.
Originally from Pasadena, California, Albini moved with his family to Montana as a teenager and immersed himself in the music of the Ramones and the Sex Pistols before playing in area punk bands. He earned a journalism degree from Northwestern University and began his recording career in 1981.
In his 1993 essay, “The Problem with Music,” Albini, who wrote articles for local Chicago music magazines in the 1980s, shed light on the underside of the business, from “The A&R person is the first to promise them the moon” succinctly breaks down how much an artist actually receives from a record advance minus fees for everything from studio fees, recording equipment and catering.
Albini, who had been preparing for the release of the first Shellac record for a decade, also competed in high-stakes poker tournaments with significant success. In 2018, he won a World Series of Poker gold bracelet and a $105,000 pot, and in 2022 he repeated his feat in a HORSE competition for a $196,000 prize. Albini’s last documented tournament took place in October at Horseshoe Hammond in Chicago.
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