Steve Albini Was an Icon of Punk-Rock Purity—but He Also Showed How You Could Evolve

There’s a quote by the legendary producer Steve Albini, whose death, of a heart attack at age 61, was announced earlier Wednesday, that’s been rattling around in my head for so many decades that it’s been paraphrased beyond recognition, or at least the reach of search engines. It goes, vaguely, like this: There is nothing better than the sound of a drum kit in an empty room.

As a producer, Albini, who recorded albums by Nirvana, PJ Harvey, Pixies, the Breeders, and hundreds of others, was renowned as an icon of punk-rock purity, one who approached the process of making albums and the business of selling them with the same uncompromising approach. When Nirvana was overwhelmed by the runaway success of their major-label debut, Nevermind, they turned to Albini for the follow-up, In Utero, hoping that his abrasive approach would help reduce their fan base to a more manageable level. Instead of jumping at the chance to work with the hottest band in the world, Albini responded with a lengthy letter outlining the circumstances under which he would, and would not, make an album with them. If they wanted to “bang a record out in a couple of days,” he was all-in. If, on the other hand, there was a risk that the record company might interfere with the process, “then you’re in for a bummer and I want no part of it.”

That same year, Albini, whose association with the alternative-rock boom had made him a household, or at least a dorm-room, name, wrote “The Problem With Music,” an acidic attack on the corporatization of music that, even three decades hence, still has enough heat to crisp your eyebrows. It begins like this:

And it ends like this, with bold in the original: “Some of your friends are probably already this fucked.”

What impressed me at the time was Albini’s righteous hostility, his refusal to make excuses for an industry he saw as irredeemably corrupt. He wouldn’t even take a traditional producing credit on the albums he made, insisting on “recorded by” instead, preferring a material description of his labor to the vague idea that he had somehow “produced” something. The music, he reasoned, belonged to the musicians, as did the money it made, which is why he declined to take “points”—a percentage of the profits—on the songs he engineered. In his letter to Nirvana, he said he wanted to “be paid like a plumber” for the work he did and nothing more. Anything else, he wrote, was “ethically indefensible.”

But Albini’s no was also a yes, one that looked beyond the sonic trends of the moment and the record-industry feeding frenzies that coaxed starry-eyed musicians into contracts that boosted their short-term exposure at the expense of their long-term existence. Reading it now, I’m struck by the extent to which “The Problem With Music” is not just a jeremiad—although it is, in every bilious utterance—but a warning. Albini doesn’t just rage against the machine. He names names: of musicians turned major-label scouts whom he paints as glorified procurers, of underground icons, like Talking Heads’ Jerry Harrison and Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo, who take vanity producing credits on other people’s albums. And he names numbers, breaking down, one line item at a time, how a seemingly generous recording contract can end up making everyone rich but the artists themselves. By the time he’s done with his example, a band signed for a quarter of a million dollars ends up making just over $4,000 apiece. “The band members have each earned about 1/3 as much as they would working at a 7-11,” he concludes, “but they got to ride in a tour bus for a month.”

Albini sometimes courted confrontation—in the late 1980s, he led a short-lived noise band called Rapeman—but he softened in his later decades, choosing his targets more intentionally. Without intending to, he became the model of a gracefully aging Gen Xer holding fast to his principles but seeming less intent on repelling anyone who didn’t precisely share, or even dared to question, them. He was also an unexpected and improbable delight on Twitter, railing against connoisseurs’ latter-day embrace of Steely Dan, whose music he said was “made for the sole purpose of letting the wedding band stretch out a little.” But he also used his account to ruminate on his past personae, especially the bluntly provocative “‘edgelord’ shit” of his earlier bands. “I was a cruder person back then,” he said in a subsequent interview, in which he called that old band name “inexcusable.” “It’s worth it to interrogate yourself and try to figure out why you’re doing things the way you are.”

Although the music he made himself was as unsparing as his reputation—To All Trains, the first album in 10 years by his trio Shellac, is due out next week—Albini’s minimalism was never the whole story. Listen, for example, to Joanna Newsom’s Ys, whose lush orchestrations feel even livelier because of the way his recording gives each instrument room to breathe. But I keep coming back to those drums. On PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me, you can hear the way the sound of the snares travels through space, not just keeping the beat but describing a universe you’re invited to inhabit. Most contemporary recordings are so compressed and optimized they might as well have been recorded in orbit around a distant planet, but with Albini’s, you’re right in the room, experiencing the music in the instant it comes into existence. In that moment, there’s nothing better.