‘I want to do things in a way that is consistent with my personal philosophy of independence, self-determination, absolute total honesty, and common sense,” is how Steve Albini summed up his approach to making records in a 1994 interview with Chicago magazine. Whether you saw the musician and recording engineer, who has died aged 61, as a bastion of ethics in a broken industry, a tape-obsessed iconoclast, an underground historian, or a proto-edgelord with the unusual ability to evolve, there is no disputing that he stuck to these beliefs.
There aren’t many people in the game who do that, and fewer still who leave behind a legacy that can be said to have shaped the narrative of modern alternative music, from Big Black to PJ Harvey, Nirvana to Joanna Newsom. Here are 10 of Albini’s best records as both a bandleader and analogue-zealot studio genius.
Big Black – Atomizer (1986)
Big Black’s music said a lot about Albini as a young person – it was abrasive, sardonic, unpleasant and uncompromising. The noise-rock pioneers’ first LP might live in the shadow of 1987’s Songs About Fucking but it offers the purest distillation of their sound: Albini and Santiago Durango’s cheesewire guitars, the inhuman thrum of a drum machine and unhinged vocals that channel Albini’s fascination with violence, inertia and small town depravity, with the discomfiting feeling that he’s studying it as a scientist would a petri dish.
Pixies – Surfer Rosa (1988)
The songs on Pixies’ first LP balanced classically taut pop hooks with true outsider energy and, thanks to a recommendation from Ivo Watts-Russell, their boss at 4AD, they lucked into an engineer whose approach was similarly contradictory. At the 16-track Q Division in the band’s native Boston, Albini used the limitations of the studio to their advantage, placing amps in hallways to capture better acoustics and stringing up mics to harness the feel of the live space on David Lovering’s drum tracks, which would become a blueprint for generations of rock bands.
Superchunk – No Pocky For Kitty (1991)
By 1991 Superchunk had honed their rollicking fusion of power-pop and punk energy through DIY touring. Working from 6pm to 6am for three nights at the glitzy Chicago Recording Company, where Albini had an after-hours hookup, their second LP’s barrage of hooks, rattling bass and chiming guitars cohered into something like college-rock’s ideal form. “Steve kept saying my leads were like the guy from REO Speedwagon, which was intended as an insult,” frontman Mac McCaughan said in the book Our Noise. “But I secretly took a small amount of pride in that.”
PJ Harvey – Rid of Me (1993)
Around 30 seconds into Rid of Me’s title track, an undulation in Polly Jean Harvey’s half-muted guitar creates the sense that everything is getting louder. It feels like the musician is digging in, though, rather than a fader being moved – a telling glimpse into the documentary approach musicians wanted from Albini. Assembled in a couple of weeks at the secluded Pachyderm studios in Minnesota, his inventive mic placements and track-it-and-move-on approach meshed perfectly with songs that were desperate and fearless, lurching from shlock-and-roll to portentous blues using a basic guitar-bass-drums formation with zero sugar-coating.
Nirvana – In Utero (1993)
If there was one person who didn’t care that Nirvana were the biggest band on Earth it was Steve Albini, who dismissed Nevermind’s multi-tracked gloss as an exercise in “hack” recording. He once recalled taking the In Utero job out of sympathy for “punk rock fan” musicians he believed were being crushed under a label’s boot, which is very him. Undercutting the hype, the record was made in his usual rapid fashion in a matter of days at Pachyderm, with Kurt Cobain’s gnarly, harrowing songs displayed as they were. The story has become the aftermath – Geffen’s horrified reaction and the decision to remix its singles – but In Utero’s staging is perfect, from the booming weight of Dave Grohl’s drums to Cobain’s lacerating screams.
Neurosis – Times of Grace (1999)
Albini rarely shied away from bands who wanted to get into sludgy recesses, but rarely did he meet his match as he did on Times of Grace, where California post-metallers Neurosis found fresh depths to their sound. It is possible to see the grime under the fingernails of these songs, with guitarist-vocalists Scott Kelly and Steve Von Till trading in molasses-thick riffage and gut-wrenching yells. The monstrous Under the Surface, all drawn-out rage and surprising shards of melody, features an unrelenting barrage of percussion as good as anything in Albini’s engineering catalogue.
Shellac – 1000 Hurts (2000)
In 1992, Albini began experimenting with the “minimalist rock trio” Shellac, finding new ways to excite and disgust listeners with only guitar, bass, drums and his increasingly confident, still sneering voice. 1000 Hurts is perhaps the best evocation of the noise-rock chemistry he found with Bob Weston and Todd Trainer, a peerless rhythm section whose grinding low end and punishing snare snaps combine for a sense of resonance that recalls getting slapped with an open hand. To All Trains, the sixth Shellac LP, is out next week.
Songs: Ohia – Magnolia Electric Co (2003)
Albini’s ability to put you in the room with a band was usually deployed in service of something confrontational or intimate, but it was also a perfect match for the shaggy aura of Jason Molina. Recorded live, there is an element here of stepping back and letting a bar band cook, but also a desire to present the scope of some classic American rock songs. During Hold On Magnolia we’re feet from a low stage as Molina pours his heart out, while on I’ve Been Riding With a Ghost, Jennie Benford’s vocals are caught by the wind and hauled skywards, with a remarkable sense of the great wide open conjured from within the four walls of Electrical Audio, the Chicago studio Albini founded in the mid-1990s.
Joanna Newsom – Ys (2006)
Here, Albini’s work was part of a much wider whole. He recorded Newsom’s harp and vocals before the record’s orchestral arrangements were overseen by Van Dyke Parks, meaning that even though these avant-pop pieces were something of a stylistic leap into the unknown, his role was familiar. He was there to facilitate and capture an honest performance, recorded by candlelight over the course of a couple of days. “I think it would have been very different if I’d recorded with the orchestra,” Newsom later told the Wire. “I think there would have been much more formality, more stiffness, and much less emotional presence.”
Sunn O))) – Life Metal (2019)
“He approached Sunn O))) in a way that a cinematographer would,” Greg Anderson told Music Tech of working with Albini. On Life Metal that meant pointing his camera at twin guitar drone-metal desolation, with Anderson and his bandmate Stephen O’Malley drawing out hulking, filthy riffs and feedback collages for as long as 20 minutes a time. There is true patience at work here – the band sought to achieve total oblivion through sheer volume and bloody-mindedness, and Albini let them. In doing so, he helped crystallise their vision into something that, once you let it slowly crush you, achieves zoned-out bliss.
