Steve Albini, influential record producer and musician, dies at 61

Steve Albini, the record producer and engineer behind generation-defining rock albums by Nirvana, the Pixies and PJ Harvey, died Tuesday. He was 61.

A representative for Electrical Audio, Albini’s Chicago recording studio, confirmed Albini’s death following a heart attack on Tuesday. The representative did not have available a further statement or a list of survivors.

Albini was a giant of punk and experimental rock music from the ’80s to the present day. He produced (or as he preferred to call his job, “engineered”) Nirvana’s final studio album, “In Utero,” selected by the band for his raw, uncompromising aesthetic. Albums like the Pixies’ “Surfer Rosa” and PJ Harvey’s “Rid of Me” felt bracing and dangerous then, and continue to inspire young rockers today for their seething energy and defiance of pop audio convention.

“I’ve gotten exactly one phone call out of a No. 1 record,” Albini told The Times in 1993. “It shows how pack-like these major-label people are. They all think the same thing: ‘That Albini guy is trouble. Stay away.’”

Albini, raised in Missoula, Montana, was the son of a rocket scientist father and inherited his engineer’s meticulousness. The young Albini, smart and disenchanted with the local conservative culture, discovered punk through music magazines and found safe harbor for misfits. After moving to Chicago to attend Northwestern University for journalism, he rose to scene prominence as an artist in the scabrous groups Big Black and Shellac, which emerged from the fertile post-hardcore underground alongside bands like Sonic Youth, Butthole Surfers and the Minutemen.

Albini paired his dedication to the most vicious, arresting sounds possible with a workmanlike professionalism as a producer in his studio, Electrical Audio. He was famous for wearing a mechanic-style jumpsuit to sessions, an overt gesture at how he saw his role.

“I’ve always had a fairly standard method,” he said of his recording techniques. “I have a straightforward, documentary approach to recording music, and I’ve never been tempted with my own bands or with anyone else’s band to suddenly go production-happy. If you let the band sound natural, then the record will sink or swim on its own merits. … The things I like most about rock bands are simplicity and straightforwardness, and those principles guide my recordings.”“

He was a ferocious advocate for artists. A famous essay in the Baffler, “The Problem With Music,” laid out the perfidies of the major-label system, at the time still in a post-Nirvana feeding frenzy for young rock acts.