Steve Albini, an influential musician, audio engineer, and producer who recorded albums for bands like Nirvana and Pixies, has died of a heart attack at the age of 61.
On Tuesday night, Brian Fox a fellow producer and engineer at Electrical Audio, confirmed Albini died from a heart attack.
“We are not ready to make any other statements yet. Maybe in the next few days, we could talk about his impact, which was immense,” Fox said in an email.
Albini’s death came little more than a week before his longtime band Shellac was set to release a new album, To All Trains, on May 17. It will be the band’s first album since 2014.
Albini was both admired and influential in the world of indie rock. He raised the genre in its heyday of the 80s and 90s to a standard that still resonates today.
Albini eagerly consumed all the new music he could find growing up as a teen in his hometown of Missoula, Montana, and played in his earliest music projects. After graduating high school, he moved to Evanston, Illinois, to attend journalism school at Northwestern University, immersing himself in the scene as a fan and a writer for local music magazines.
Albini began his music career in 1981 when he formed the punk rock band Big Black while a student at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.
He later went on to form two other bands, the controversially named Rapeman and Shellac, with the latter the longest-existing and arguably the most important band of his career as a performer. For Shellac, he performed vocals and guitar alongside bassist Bob Weston and drummer Todd Trainer.
Albini was completely loyal to people he liked, but he didn’t suffer fools happily, he doesn’t have patience for bullshit, and could sometimes be sarcastic, confrontational, and offensive, especially when he was younger. More recently, he professed some of the inflammatory and morally questionable positions from his youth, while maintaining his uncompromising advocacy for the better, smarter world he wanted to see.
Albini settled into a workday life in Chicago, working unselectively with most of the artists who asked, touring and releasing albums with Shellac, and becoming a very successful professional poker player. In 2018, he won a World Series of Poker gold bracelet with a prize of over $105,000 — and nearly doubled that jackpot with a second victory four years later.
He also helped record music for legends such as Cheap Trick, Jimmy Page and Robert Plant, and Foo Fighters, who recorded their hit song ”something from Nothing.” Also helped record and track some of the most influential albums of the alternative rock era in the 1980s and 1990s, including Nirvana’s “In Utero,” Pixies’ “Surfer Rosa,” PJ Harvey’s “Rid of Me,” Veruca Salt’s EP “Blow It Out Your A** It’s Veruca Salt,” and multiple albums for Urge Overkill and The Jesus Lizard.
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