Steve Albini, a rock musician and revered audio engineer who played a singular role in the development of the sound of alternative rock music in the 1980s, the ’90s and beyond — recording acclaimed albums by Nirvana, PJ Harvey, Pixies and hundreds of others — while becoming an outspoken critic of the music industry, died on Tuesday at his home in Chicago. He was 61.
The cause was a heart attack, according to Taylor Hales of Electrical Audio, the studio in Chicago that Mr. Albini founded in 1997.
With a sharp vision for how a band should be recorded, and an even sharper tongue for anything he deemed mediocre or compromised, Mr. Albini was one of rock’s most acerbic wits. He was also a withering critic of the exploitive extremes of the major-label music business, describing in a widely-quoted 1993 article, “The Problem With Music,” the ways that naïve bands are lured into major deals with labels that, in most cases, leave them broke and in debt.
Aside from everything else, he knew how to record a drum kit which is more than several “big name” producers can muster.