Steve Albini

“If all Steve Albini ever did with music was complain about it, he still would have reigned as one of its most brilliant provocateurs,” Rob Sheffield wrote in a tribute following Albini’s death at age 61. “But Albini came to make noise — as a punk guitarist, as a producer, as a writer —with rock’s most notoriously savage sense of humor.”

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 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 production approach to other artists’ music.

After honing 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.

In the early Nineties, Albini continued to produce and engineer albums at a prolific pace, recording with bands like the Jesus Lizard, Tad, Failure, Superchunk, and the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. In 1993, Albini was recruited to work on a pair of high-profile, major-label LPs: PJ Harvey’s sophomore album, Rid of Me, and Nirvana’s much-anticipated follow-up to Nevermind, In Utero.

Despite Albini’s notoriously acerbic and opinionated personality, Kurt Cobain said of recording with him in a 1993 Details interview, “For the most part, he was surprisingly pleasant to work with.” However, after recording In Utero over two weeks, Nirvana’s label DGC was apparently taken aback by how un-commercial the follow-up to the multiplatinum Nevermind was, and after initially refusing to release the LP, the label finally acquiesced after a pair of radio-friendlier tracks (“Heart-Shaped Box” and “All Apologies”) were remixed by Scott Litt, which drove a wedge between Nirvana, Albini, and the finished product.  In Utero would soon be regarded as an alt-rock masterpiece and one of Rolling Stone‘s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.

Outside the recording studio, Albini was also a successful semiprofessional poker player, even winning a pair of prestigious World Series of Poker bracelets. “Everything in my life comes in pieces, in parts. Poker is one part of my life,” Albini told WSOP after his win in 2022.

In a now-revered op-ed he wrote titled “The Problem With Music,” published shortly after the arrival of In Utero, Albini took a scathing look at the music industry, as well as the role of “producer” and why he warned artists against signing with major labels.