The Singles Jukebox

The late Steve Albini was many things: musician, engineer, longtime punk, unrepentant gadfly, eventually repentant edgelord, one-time recipe blogger, pretty good poker player, excoriating essayist, late-career Twitter personality, and general opinion-haver–but not, he insisted, a producer. (He’d probably have some specific words to aim at all the obits calling him one.) Producers, he argued, were generally charlatans, in it for the wrong reasons. They could care about music, in theory; they just didn’t have to. And Steve Albini was, perhaps above all, a person who cared.

Albini shaped a tremendous swath of the pantheon of punk and alternative rock – though he’d perhaps say that the pantheon shaped itself by itself, and he was just there to facilitate. The volume and breadth of music he facilitated was so vast we’d never be able to cover it all. So in the spirit of his lifelong egalitarianism, we present songs spanning the many decades of his career by both major artists and cult faves, critical giants and deep cuts, canonical highlights and highlights of our own musical worlds. We like to think it’s what he’d have wanted. If not, we’re sure he’d have something to say.

TA Inskeep on Big Black, “Jordan, Minnesota” (1986)

Here’s how fucking ahead of his time Steve Albini was: On the opening track of the first Big Black full-length, it sounds like they’re inventing U.S. industrial music as we came to know it. The mechanistic rhythm (thanks partially to the Roland TR-606 drum machine), the sheer aggression, the disturbing subject matter, the repeated lyric “This will stay with you until you die,” even the heavy breathing cut-ins and the screams — this could be anything on Wax Trax! over the remainder of the decade. But instead it was on Touch and Go, another incredibly influential and important Chicago indie label started in the ‘80s. Albini and his bandmates, guitarist Santiago Durango and bassist Dave Riley, just locked into a groove and rode it to its goddamn death, maybe never better than right here. 

Jeff Brister on Big Black, Songs About Fucking (1987)

I’m not sure how Songs About Fucking ended up in my iTunes library—I think it was a torrent of Pitchfork’s ’80s album list that I grabbed in 2009. The album cover was distinctive, and it had a swear word in the title. How could an immature 21-year-old post-adolescent say no to that? This was how I learned that Albini made music in addition to recording it, and it was my introduction to music that could be harsh and confrontational through means besides blast beats and walls of guitar shredding. 

Songs About Fucking is mean-spirited and caustic; pop music without the palatable elements that, through its precision and craft, still manages to be appealing and fun. The album is fierce and fearless, a snarling but controlled burst of harsh sound pounded into shape. On “Bad Penny,” Albini embodies the shittiest friend one can imagine (“I think I fucked your girlfriend once/maybe twice, I don’t remember”) over an attack of squealing guitar harmonics and hyperactive drums, all compressed into 2:34. The album was also the first time I’d ever heard a Kraftwerk song. “The Model” is unusual for how not-unusual it is: Big Black replicate the mechanical exactness of the original, while adding a few noise freakouts. A few weeks after my introduction to this album, being really into the drums, I actually decided to look up who was able to be so metronomically exact—it’s a literal drum machine. I eventually dug into Kraftwerk’s discography, and found a whole new genre to explore, with its own history and classics. 

Hundreds of albums and genres and songs later, Songs About Fucking opened my eyes and ears to a world of music that I still feel I’ve barely explored. Albini leaves behind an incredible body of work on both sides of the booth–and I would have remained ignorant of a significant part of it had he not informed me that the backbone of this country is the independent truck.

Harlan Talib Ockey on Pixies, “Gigantic” (1988)

“Gigantic” was rerecorded for its single release by Gil Norton (later of produced-Doolittle fame), which gives us a clear compare-and-contrast account of what Steve Albini brought. Norton’s version is feisty, bass-forward pop-alt-rock. Albini’s version is destructive. Deal’s voice echoes in the listener’s skull, the guitars scraping against each other like rusty gears. His edition of “Gigantic,” rather than cleaning the song up for public consumption, is unflinchingly real. The lyrics are an unsettlingly blithe take on Crimes of the Heart (1986), but half the song is the same two lines repeated over and over. Their real magic trick is to roll the words around until they either sound like philosophical maxims or stop being words at all. The guitar and bass fuse into a leviathan riff, burning the disc in two. The drums periodically explode. This was the only single from Surfer Rosa. You needed to buy the record to hear the truth.

Mark Sinker on Ut, “Griller” and “Griller X” (1989)

I’d already adored Ut for some years when Griller dropped in 1989, and it quietly bothered me when Albini was announced as its producer. I loved their cryptic three-woman No Wave rigour, their dogged unwillingness despite a physical transplant from No Wave New York to a much more shapeless London to adapt to values they considered specious. I loved the sparks of harsh alien beauty you’d glimpse through a forest of ancient murk — but I loved the murk as well. The murk mattered a lot to me. I didn’t think them remotely fragile — I’d met them several times and fully imagined them a match for any quasi-edgelord whims — but I didn’t want their intransigence, which mattered to me, muddled into Albini’s loud no-sell-out provocations, which often creeped me out. (The band that came after Big Black was very much the big thing then attached to him.) 

Yet even though I’d recoiled a little at the time, this is probably my favourite of Ut’s LPs today. “Griller” and “Griller X” are two versions of the LP’s signature song (the second the B-side of the pre-emptive single). Partly they’re about the fiercely controlled build of intensity, about the punkish punctuation-stutter; partly about the duelling tumble of Jacqui and Sally’s voices in a now-and-then surround of shrills and yelps; partly about a surprise pass through, or anyway near, RnR tradition (an emergent “Who Do You Know?” that’s a clear call-back to Bo Diddley), and partly just the compressed and utterly cussed Utness. Albini did them right by lovingly capturing and cherishing every last guitar scrape and slice. For all his pronounced Adorno-esque absolutes about electric sound capture, right and wrong, in the end he simply wished to deliver, pragmatically and without dilution, the exact thing he was good at in the zone he knew best.

Taylor Alatorre on Superchunk, “Skip Steps 1 & 3” (1991)

Just as the name “Superchunk” serves as a near-onomatopoeia for the band’s musical style, you could probably guess what “Skip Steps 1 & 3” sounds like from the title alone. In keeping with the spirit of that title, here’s a list of approved adjectives to draw on when describing “Skip Steps 1 & 3,” to which you can add nouns or verbs to your liking: rollicking, raw, immediate, propulsive, punchy, flippant, petulant, youthful, insistent, and of course, the all-purpose anthemic. 

Ignore the “slacker rock” moniker that Superchunk’s breakthrough single “Slack Motherfucker” would forever tag them with, for this is a song that follows the immortal punk commandment of Beavis and Butt-head: “if you’re going to be horrible, at least like, you know, kick ass!” Besides the Jesus Lizard connection, here’s one fact about Steve Albini that Butt-head in particular might appreciate: in his 2012 Reddit AMA, Albini said that AC/DC was one of the bands he would have most liked to work with. Mac McCaughan is no Angus Young, clearly, but the two bands in their most classic incarnations share a transparent devotion to rock for rock’s sake, a trait which makes them both easy to pick up and, for many a newcomer, easy to dismiss. When today’s budding music nerds want to dive deeper into The Year Punk Broke, the albums they’re gonna put on first are Loveless and Spiderland, not No Pocky for Kitty. 

But it would be a mistake to dismiss Superchunk as mere Gen X comfort food or as a stepping stone to more challenging, artsy fare. They’re clever when they’re trying not to be, and even their most primal romps like this are packed with hummable hooks both big and small, which draw their power from the thrillingly provisional way in which they’re delivered. This is tightly wound and seamlessly plotted music that wants you to think it’s perpetually on the verge of careening off course– a paradox that could be applied to indie rock as a whole, given how many of its practitioners were the temporarily precarious scions of the middle and upper classes. Poverty “was someplace we were merely visiting,” as the guitarist for the Albini-associated Bitch Magnet wrote. Viewed through this lens, even the seemingly indolent title of “Skip Steps 1 & 3” carries hidden echoes of collegiate striving. These people have in their hands an enumerated list of the rules for success, and they are choosing, in a deliberate manner, which to follow and which to safely discard. They act out in song the traffic violations that they cannot commit in real life, and on stage they berate their shiftless peers with the words they can’t use in their day job at Kinko’s. But if it’s true that “the sound’s as good as the action,” then why shouldn’t rebellion be a phase – or, more optimistically, a well-maintained backyard thrill ride that we can revisit whenever the mood strikes us?

Mark Sinker on Cath Carroll, “Train You’re On” (1991)

In 1990 Albini and Cath Carroll had made a version of “King Creole” together for an NME special Elvis album tribute release (of all absurd things); but she’s too quiet and he’s too loud, and either way it’s a song I never really liked. But he also plays on “Train You’re On” in duo with Santiago Durango, as the two chattering guitar-demons at Cath’s two shoulders (Colombian-born Durango was her husband at the time; these days he’s an appellate defense attorney). This song closed out the original running order of Carroll’s England Made Me, the best little-known LP of 1991, its sessions recorded on three continents and layered together in London, Sheffield, São Paulo and Chicago. Very much an outlier in Factory’s official legends, it likely recouped almost none of its outlay and bankrupted the label, or so Tony Wilson apparently teased Cath (though, to be fair, there were other candidates for this blunder).

Very gentle, very funny, very smart, very VERY perverse, Carroll was a Manchester scene stalwart who quit the UK for Chicago, which she found she loved nevertheless because it reminded her of Manchester. She is someone who never really seems to raise her voice but is, as a mutual once advised me, absolutely the weirdest person you ever met. The rest of her LP is all uneasy liquid-velvet electro-janglepop surface, with “something underwater turning ten fathoms deep / and swimming after you and me,” as she sings somewhere on it – and then there’s this final leap into wild and frightening flight, with two-thirds of Big Black clattering and grinding and somehow entirely at one with the Brazilian session percussionists also present (including some Cecil Taylor–style keyboard type). Flight out and away from the obsessively blocked, mesmerised soft-voice stasis that precedes it – towards what exactly? A prayer to cruel otherworldly bird-gods, its elements in uncanny balance, it’s a perfect hurtling call toward a decade that then never quite came to be, a 1990s of your best lost fevered dreams: a future we were all denied. 

Jonathan Bradley on Jawbreaker, “Ashtray Monument” (1994)

The liner notes for Jawbreaker’s third album, 24 Hour Revenge Therapy, will tell you that production was handled by the band, with engineering work done by the mononymic Fluss. Only on the 20th anniversary re-release of the album would Steve Albini’s name work its way into the credits, where he was acknowledged as doing the recording; Fluss, his cat, remained responsible for engineering. Loath to center himself on someone else’s record at the best of times, Albini, for Jawbreaker, effaced his contribution almost to the point of non-existence. Perhaps it was just another job for him; he recorded the band at his home studio at a time when he was working on as many projects as he could, and though the band was starstruck by him, he might have initially mixed them up with DC post-hardcore act Jawbox. “I remember Jawbreaker being one of the few punk bands I had run across at that point that had a more melodic sensibility,” he later told Pitchfork. He also said that his role on the record was “not that important, ultimately”: “The band is doing all the work; I’m sort of part of the equipment.” But despite this dispassionate relationship, Albini’s work with Jawbreaker exemplifies what he saw as his role as a producer to be: to capture the band as it exists, allowing the artist to be heard as they are. 

No Jawbreaker record sounds more like Jawbreaker than 24 Hour Revenge Therapy. “Ashtray Monument” is a tangled and scrabbling bayonet charge of a punk song, too murky and warped to pogo to, yet one that builds into a gigantic guitar assault that, at basement scale, counts as anthemic. Singer Blake Schwarzenbach’s gravelly wail falls beneath the waves of guitar, his words occasionally emerging as clear yet cryptic phrases (“Run for a cover, there’s a big one coming”; “You said ‘I love you,’ I guess you did”) before collapsing into the scrimmage. Jawbreaker songs are so affecting because from all this noise, they reveal secret melodies and immense swells of overwhelming emotion that subsume themselves once more into crunch and scree. Capturing that rawness on record is a harder task than might be supposed. “The band wrote all the songs and performed everything and made the decisions,” Albini said, and yet never was the impact of those songs and decisions more powerful than with him (and Fluss) there to hear them, respond to them, and press record.

Katherine St. Asaph on Souls, “Sonic Sorehead” (1995)

Souls was, according to a possibly-vaporware 2010s documentary, “a fucked up Swedish band from the nineties that got all the chances and blew them all,” and according to vocalist Cecilia Nordlund, “a giant dick far up in the indie pop music ass.” You can see how, based solely on vibes, this would endear them to Albini. Possessing a hunger for mythmaking too vast for their hometown of Helsingborg (familiarize yourself), Souls found an agent, Anders Jönsson, who cold contacted Albini with their demo based on “a gut feeling”–i.e., vibes. Albini agreed to step in for the band’s debut, Tjitchischtsiy, recorded in a Växjö studio full of flies but equipped to all Albini’s tech-head standards. (The album title – like many things the band did – was a troll, engineered to make as many radio DJs eat as much shit as possible when trying to pronounce it.) Why this group? “These guys have gone to some effort to express themselves,” he said, “which is rare.”

Coming from Albini, that praise was less faint than it sounds, but Souls’ time with him was nevertheless more fitful than a fit. Bird, Fish or In Between, their follow-up and bid to blow up globally, was recorded in Albini’s basement in Chicago and mixed in his attic. The experience was interpersonally grueling, far more painful than the Tjitchischtsiy sessions–sessions during which guitarist Andreas Catjar had his literal ribs fucked up–and the band wasn’t thrilled with the musical result. Only a few of the Albini tracks made it to the album. The rest was redone with Nille Perned, a producer with a journeyman’s discography of largely Swedish acts–plus, later on and randomly, Chrissie Hynde and David Lynch. If any animosity existed between the band and the engineer, it wasn’t permanent; Albini returned in 2016 to re-release Souls’ debut for Bandcamp.

If I’m being honest, my favorite things about Bird, Fish or In Between are the things that exist independent of Albini: the massive production onslaught that is overwhelming and enormous in a way that’s a bit orthogonal to his ethos, and Nordlund’s gloriously deranged vocals and songwriting, careening from maybe-incest to contempt-filled crushes to breaking into a man’s house and usurping his wife’s spot in bed with the reasoning of “I’m a jealous bitch.” (Alanis could maybe, but the closest she came was “Your House,” which is a pleasant hidden a cappella track where she asks for permission to sleep there.) “Sonic Sorehead” has power of a different sort. It’s one of the Albini tracks the band retained, and you can tell. The song has a quiet-loud structure that’s markedly more restrained than its surroundings (though it also, it must be said, sounds very much like Nirvana), and Albini extracts palpable tension and charge from every ebb and pause. Perhaps relatedly, the lyrics express a vulnerability the rest of the album blusters and postures past, and the silence leaves no room to hide it. Bird, Fish or In Between sounds feral in the obvious sense of the word: loud, clawing. “Sonic Sorehead” is feral like a wild snake is feral: you wait for it to strike every moment it’s around, and even when it doesn’t, you sort of feel like it did.

Nortey Dowouna on Oxbow, Let Me Be a Woman (1995)

Steve Albini charged bands $900 for in-house recording, $1,300 for traveling costs. He did this consistently throughout his career, no matter what bands he recorded – and that was the word, “recorded.” He recorded the music in his studio without any frills or additions. He didn’t attempt to stab, gut, cut or saw at the songs: he let them ebb, pulse, then explode at the console, all while reading his magazine (allegedly, always allegedly; word to Jon Caramanica). 

Oxbow, led by Eugene Robinson and by then the only black band Albini ever recorded (imagine my despair learning that neither person in Big Black was even biracial), were willing to pay the $900 and thrash through the mics. Each song on Let Me Be a Woman has recognizable motifs, each of them endlessly exciting due to the lack of polish. From “Sunday” to “Gal” to “The Virgin Bride,” the album lurches from gleefully irascible fusillade, to chilly yet punchy expresso, to jagged, nimble numbers. The album inches along with a gritted determination before pausing for the languid and plaintive “1000,” leaping back into action with the tipsy, twitchy tumbling of “Me and the Moon,” then slipping into near silence halfway through “The Stabbing Hand.” It’s a jarring but engaging listen, ugly and heavy: the beautiful lyrics are purposefully drowned out to near incomprehensibility. (Or maybe, in a certain the-curtains-were-just-blue way, this was just due to the mic gain being cut with no reverb on it.)

Robinson, a formidable voice both verbose and terse, surprisingly contributes a small amount to this steaming, sriracha-laden soup. Niko Wenner plays piano, guitar and hammond organ, Dan Adams plays bass guitar, and Tom Dobrov, for whom Let Me Be a Woman would be the last trip around the sun with the band, plays percussion. Dobrov does leave a lasting impression: wherever his drums rain down, they are always clear, heavy, and more cutting than any of the scalpel-cut poetry here. Wenner, triple threat (or just a threat) handles the rest of the production tricks, which Albini leaves to him. The organ he plays fills the gaps in “The Stabbing Hand,” a very George Martin technique that allows the song to wistfully drift before snapping back into its prickly, unsettling thud. Cintra Wilson, Jorjee, Sanxe Lovxa, Alicia J. Rose and Claudia Herzog add textures and sounds that shift the album into strange directions. Jorjee and Sanxe’s voices on “1000” are raw and visceral, not harmonizing with the lead but dueling with him, twirling around him, lurking behind him as his shadows, then becoming corporeal to harmonize with the bass and guitar instead. Claudia’s violin flits up and down the scale in “Gal,” the one place where Robinson’s voice suddenly becomes transparent and cutting, a nervous, itchy cutting to the bone. Rose’s wheezing, hissing accordion is heard on opener “Sunday,” and Wilson’s piano is an oasis of calm that evaporates into seething discontent as the gravely chords slam down on Robinson’s baritone. 

As for Albini’s contributions to Oxbow’s compositions, Robinson said there were none. He wrote to record, he came to record, he recorded for a while, then he left to record. I can’t really end this better than with a quote from the recorder himself: “Eugene Robinson is a great writer and I admire him. His imposing size and association with fight culture imply an overpowering personality, but uniquely among his peers, he is unafraid to risk vulnerability. He writes intelligently about fights and fighting, but for me he is most enlightening when he writes about life between blows: Frank accounts of aspirations in art or music, personal and societal relationships, his moments of fear or compromise, what he got wrong about a person or situation, what he misunderstood, what he endured. This introspection is rendered as clearly as a crisp left hook and that makes all the difference between limbic alpha-male yowling and the expression of a complete mind, artful, thoughtful, unafraid of itself and aware of its role in its own problems. Most writing, non-fiction included, buffers the writer from consequence with some kind of bullshit. The writer’s voice keeps you at a distance with writerly devices, wordplay, echoes of received style or import. I have the luxury of knowing Eugene apart from his writing, and I am certain he is not bullshitting you.” Robinson said that when he read this, he cried like a baby. And if I were to be paid such a sincere, frank compliment rooted in the tangible reality of our day-to-day relationship, I would cry too. Rest in peace, Mr. Albini.

Frank Falisi on Veruca Salt, Blow It Out Your Ass, It’s Veruca Salt (1996)

The critic gushes opaque about the real role of a record producer. And why not? The verbiage has a certain grandiloquence—think of writing a sentence like “How do you even ‘produce’ when it’s actually someone else’s voice singing, someone else’s sinews hitting?” Consider the cheap urge to sweep figuratively (“The producer voices the voices”) or reckless-speculatively (“The producer reminds a musician what their sound could be”) until any tangible labor trail retreats completely from view.

It’s not just critics who knot themself up in nothing-ing. I spent a season working in a bookstore, handing copies of Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act: A Way of Being to fash-curious Econ majors and daytrip six-figured (seven?) nuclear families melting down, all hoping to find self-optimization through pop psychologizing. As “art” is continually coerced into “content,” the act of caretaking over it—producing, editing, curating, critiquing—becomes just another Public Relation, a commodity to strip-mine for self-meaning and bolstered efficiency. How, then, do we celebrate the labor of producers and editors without subsuming them as avatars for our future self-models, or worse, reducing them to Great Individuals divining art in ways unknown to the rank-and-file strummer? 

The double task of caretaking a sound and paying tribute to the caretaker in question—Steve Albini—becomes an act of becoming invisible. Listening to his labor in Blow It Out Your Ass, It’s Veruca Salt is to indicate presence as absence and legible authorship as something merely (thankfully, turbulently) speculative. The band would record records that were more seminal (American Thighs), well-loved (Eight Arms to Hold You), and mature (Ghost Notes). Blow it Out Your Ass… is four songs on the highway to grand band biography: an EP, an exercise, a note, a yawp from the crevice between bigger moves. Still, “Shimmer Like a Girl” is as good a manifesto moment as any, a highlight of the band’s girl-forward, sex-positive, thrashed pop ethos. Guitars sludge and vibrate in the sludge. Drum sets are about the hit of a stick and the instant-rattle that snaps into a snare hit, a ride slap, a bass heart. No band from the ’90s alternative movement better made sound shimmer. Imagine the band in a room. Imagine a room as a sentence. Imagine reading sound for narrative, rhythm, affect, emotion. Imagine an ear to service the sentence. Imagine an ear that writes–and moves out of the way. 

I don’t know where Steve begins and Veruca Salt ends. I wonder whether—if there can be a future in thinking long and slow and hearty about art—this collapse is our best chance at resisting the crumble of culture. No individuals or selves to help, no writers with answers. Just a band, a shimmering of the air around us into another shape for a second, for a song. The recording of music proves that air can look different when it has noise in it. The same difference might be said for our bodies or our desires or the systems we labor under. That’s not a lesson I was taught by a producer insistent on inscription–just something that slid off the motion of a sound.

Alfred Soto on Bush, “Swallowed” (1996)

The scion who recorded In Utero offered his services to Nirvana’s most successful mimics three years later. Purists (raises hand) mocked Steve Albini and Bush, determinedly ignorant of the fact that purity and good rock are not bedfellows. Yet I hear more Polly Jean Harvey than Kurt Cobain in Gavin Rossdale’s earnest gargle. Thanks to it, and the sort of hooks on which bands gladly hang themselves, “Swallowed” lands with a confident thud. Albini’s bone-dry mix flatters the Dave Parsons and Alan Goodridge rhythm section. All this, and a sudden chord change undreamt of by Black Francis. Years later Albini would take no shit about his work with Bush. “Swallowed” proved that riffs and cheekbones are amiable collaborators. 

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann on Pansy Division, “February 17” (1998)

The first three Pansy Division albums are… fun! They’re cute little cheap-sounding Bay Area punk songs with pun-focused titles and queer literary references. On Absurd Pop Song Romance, their fourth album and their first mixed by Steve Albini, they instead decided to write a dozen of the best power pop songs of all time, and integrated the best parts of Husker Dü, The Buzzcocks, Blondie, and The Beatles into serrated hooks; songs that stick with you for years and years after they come. Pansy Division sound like world-striding conquerors and junkyard scrappers all at once on “February 17,” the album’s lead track. It’s a fairly standard aging punk’s reflection on the passage of time (written for Billie Joe Armstrong’s 25th birthday, lol), but Albini’s anti-production makes it hit with more than enough force to have profoundly impacted my psyche. His work here is his standard job: he makes the guitars and drums sound better than you could ever imagine them to.

Ian Mathers on Low, “Laser Beam” (2001)

If you read accounts from musicians who worked with Steve Albini as a recording engineer, one thing that keeps coming up is his devotion to the sound of the room itself. In his own beloved Electrical Audio where he recorded two Low albums (among many others), Albini built those rooms from the ground up and thus could begin with total awareness of their nature and the copious gear he had on hand to capture them. But accounts of his work at other studios often include him taking hours or days to figure out the sound of the room, wanting as always to document and preserve the best and most accurate version of what you would have heard if you’d been there. Interviews passed around in the wake of his sudden death have shown him talking about the immense responsibility he felt to the artists he worked with, saying that his preference for analogue had more to do with notions of long-term cultural preservation than aesthetics. (To be fair, he preferred analogue on those grounds too.) That’s one of the reasons a guy with such a distinct sound in his own work and such very specific preferences for the art he loved could do such a fantastic job recording a much wider range of music. 

As Low’s Alan Sparhawk recently shared, while he and bassist Zak Sally were excited to work with Albini, the more initially blasé Mimi Parker wound up having the sensibility that was most compatible with him. Parker never came across as having Albini’s often aggressive intensity (in the rare times she participated in interviews), but fans of both can imagine a kind of laconic, blunt, dry wit uniting them when they met. Both of the records Albini worked on, Secret Name and Things We Lost in the Fire, sound great. But there’s a reason that, when Parker passed in 2022, so many people (myself included) shared “Laser Beam” specifically; it’s one of the greatest showcases we have for her astounding, unearthly, yet very human singing. She doesn’t play drums at all on it, giving a brief account of a shattering childhood experience over gentle, withdrawn playing by Sparhawk and Sally. The guitars practically hum in that room, ever-palpable in Albini’s recording work. Even more than normal, Parker seems to float over the song. Assuming our world keeps going, people not yet born will one day be able to truly hear her voice. And that, too, was the work of Steve Albini’s life.

Rebecca Gowns on Joanna Newsom, Ys (2006)

Every time you listen to this album and hear the Van Dyke Parks orchestration swelling around Joanna Newsom, rich and lush, remember that Steve Albini recorded all her tracks alone–just the two of them in a room, in a simple, intimate process. Joanna sang and played her harp, and Albini sat with her and recorded her. She said that together, they built an “environment of closeness and spontaneity.” Lit by candlelight! In a full-circle moment, after she received the news of his passing, Newsom dedicated “Cosmia” to him at a live show. I found this gesture and the connection between the two of them touching. “I miss your precious heart,” she sings on the version of “Cosmia” on Ys, her voice coming through crystal clear.

Brad Shoup on Shellac, “Be Prepared” (2007)

There’s nothing particularly complicated about noise rock–it’s a knob that goes from hangover to skull trituration–but Shellac was as workaday as one of Albini’s jumpsuits. Like a choosy consultancy, the trio would parachute into a project every few years, knock things into shape, then clock out. Clean work. (The earlier bands, they were more like shits in the breakroom wastebasket.) “Be Prepared” is a well-honed joke: a thudding processional for some know-it-all toff. “I was born embroiled in an argument.” “I was born wearing spats and a dickie.” (The best one: “I was born already bald”.) It’s not about cutting so much as cutting up, though Albini and Bob Weston can’t help but shout the title with the urgency of econo lifers. A lot—too much?—of words have been devoted to Albini’s careful extrication from anti-PC bomblobbing. (I’m sure you can find your fill of alt lifers without tryhard pasts.) Still, there’s something real satisfying in the way that Shellac divorce complication from confrontation, how they break from the stage in the last 30 seconds to slump in a chair, thoroughly disillusioned. But not before summoning a boogie that suggests Queens of the Stone Age by way of ZZ Top. All in a day’s work.

Claire Biddles on The Breeders, “Bang On” (2008)

Albini was known for creating a palpable sense of space in his productions: deliberately placing mics in the studio to audibly map a room within the song. A lot of the songs he recorded sound airy and wide-open, but he could also do the opposite. In “Bang On” — from the Breeders’ fourth album, and their fourth recorded with Albini — all the air has been sucked out. The drums are compressed into almost nothing; the bass is barely recognisable. Kim and Kelley Deal sing from the centre of a vacuum, or a locked quarantine room, almost bragging that “I want no-one/and no-one wants me.” Even the song’s two minute duration could be the result of necessity, the length of a held breath. But after the ninth or tenth repeated listen, something appears in the distance: a faint handclap, the only organic sound, like ambient noise from an almost-forgotten outside world.