Steve Albini, iconoclastic rock musician and engineer, dies at 61
NPRSteve Albini, iconoclastic rock musician and engineer, dies at 61 Enlarge this image toggle caption John Semley/WXPN John Semley/WXPN Steve Albini, renowned for decades as a distinctive musician and recording engineer, died Tuesday night of a heart attack. Albini famously did not like to be called a "producer," but he worked on — by his own estimate — "a couple thousand" records as a recording engineer, including classics like the Pixies' Surfer Rosa, Nirvana's In Utero and PJ Harvey's Rid of Me. On records like Atomizer and Songs About F******, Big Black would realize Albini's imitable sound: a terse and treble-heavy clang of guitars throttled by grotesque bass lines, with darkly funny and threatening lyrics screamed. The band's drum machine, which gave Big Black's austere punk an industrial sheen, was always credited as "Roland." By 1987, when Big Black was breaking up, Albini had already spent years recording "my friends and then my friend's friends, and then friends of my friend's friends," as he told Free Press Houston in 2018.
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