In 1992, Kurt Cobain was thinking about the next step for his band Nirvana. With their hit album Nevermind (1991), the grunge group from Seattle had managed to tear down the wall between ‘alternative’ and ‘mainstream’, by producing punk-like songs that were accessible and poppy.
On the new album, that In Utero was going to be called, it had to be different: it had to be raw and hard, the fans had to be tested and preferably partly chased away.
About the author
Menno Pot prescribes de Volkskrant about pop music.
A band that wanted that had to be with Steve Albini, the producer who did not want to be called a producer, but just recording engineer: recording engineer. He didn’t ‘produce’ anything, he thought, but merely recorded – analogue, ‘honest’ and straightforward. Nirvana’s record label was shocked and dropped In Utero (1993) slightly fine-tuned for appearance.
31 years after the most famous of his thousands of recording jobs, Albini died unexpectedly of a heart attack last Tuesday, ‘at home’ in his Electrical Audio studio in Chicago.
Albini was 61 and still active in the studio every day, also as a musician. His noise rock band Shellac, of which he was the singer and guitarist, has a new studio album ready: To All Trains, which will be released on May 17. The band is scheduled to tour Europe this summer.
Transverse punk
As a teenager in Missoula, Montana, Albini was captivated by the unruly punk of The Ramones, Sex Pistols, Pere Ubu and Devo, but also by the Dutch crack punk band The Ex, of whom he was a big fan.
He played in numerous bands, two of which achieved global underground fame: Big Black (1981-1987) and Shellac (1992-2024). Especially the metallic, industrial violence of Big Black, with Albini as a ferocious guitar editor, is still influential in today’s punk, industrial and alternative metal.
By the time Shellac’s debut album At Action Park was released in 1994, Albini was more famous as a recording director than as a musician. He believed that rock should sound noisy and rudimentary: amplifiers should roar and cymbals should sound like a silverware drawer clattering on the kitchen floor.
The Pixies’ debut album, Surfer Rosa (1988), was his breakthrough. Pod (1990) by The Breeders and Rid of Me (1993) by PJ Harvey sealed his fame. Kurt Cobain listened and knew enough.
After Nirvana, Albini’s phone rarely went silent. Led Zeppelin veterans Jimmy Page and Robert Plant wanted their first album as a duo, NoQuarter (1994), contemporary raw sound: Albini! Nirvana epigoon Bush also wanted one In Utero: Albini took them Razorblade Suitcase (1996) op.
Furious critic
Yet Albini remained fundamentally approachable and affordable for ‘small’ bands and novice artists: Mogwai, Godspeed You! Black Emperor or, completely different, Joanna Newsom. They only paid his fair studio rate. He thought that a recording engineer should not benefit from any potential millions in revenue: he thought that producers who wanted to take a bite out of the royalties were assholes.
Yes, indeed: bastards. Albini’s breakthrough as a recording leader coincided with his breakthrough as a furious critic of the music industry, a world of suckers who could count on his unconditional and explicitly debited hatred.
The article The Problem With Music (1993) would become his most famous indictment of the music industry: a foaming-at-the-mouth argument with mathematical examples about how artists’ money systematically disappeared into the wrong pockets. Don’t try to look up bands like Big Black and Shellac on a platform like Spotify: Albini didn’t want to know anything about their financial model.
He was also controversial as a studio craftsman. Contrary to the attraction he exerted on rock musicians with punk plans, there was the disgust of the many critics who considered him a sound hooligan, with his sandpaper and jackhammer editing guilty of the destruction of strong albums such as those of the Pixies, PJ Harvey and Nirvana.
Averse to fuss
Anyone who visited Steve Albini met a quiet, personable and humorous man, averse to fuss. The undersigned experienced this at the end of 1999 when he went to Chicago in the wake of the Amsterdam guitar band Caesar to watch the recording of their album. Leaving Sparks (2000), recorded at Electrical Audio. Albini had the studio, an inconspicuous rectangular building on desolate Belmont Avenue, built in 1997.
There he worked, always dressed in his sea green overalls, a mug of coffee with maple syrup within reach. He crawled across the floor to meticulously place microphones in the right places. Recording was analogue, on tape; editing with scissors, glue and tape welding machine. Bands that visited were allowed to stay in the guesthouses and were lovingly cared for.
In the evening, the administration and bills waited: anyone who refuses on principle to cash in on their market value has to do it all themselves. In the meantime, he wanted to talk about Nirvana again.
“I’ll never forget someone from their record label Geffen walking in with a huge pile of contracts and releases. I hate that nonsense. But I think Nirvana felt that I wasn’t some leech that wanted something from them.’
That reputation was sacred to him. Anyone who wanted to give their fans a real scare on the next album could count on Steve.
3 x Steve Albini
• Songs About Fucking (1987): Albini as singer and guitarist of Big Black. Blueprint for his style as a recording engineer: a rhythm section that seems recorded in the bathroom, against a continuous wall of grinding noise.
• In Utero (1993): Nirvana’s swan song. Already from the opening chord of Serve the Servantsas if a shelving unit full of pans falls over, the intention is clear: Albini presents the ‘anti-Nevermind.
• Leaving Sparks (2000): Albini’s subtler side; no wall of noise, but characteristic Albini drums. In addition to this album by Caesar from Amsterdam, Albini also recorded albums with the Dutch bands The Ex and Cords.
