Steve Albini, the Insult Comic

Steve Albini was a great recording engineer. (And he preferred being called an engineer, not a producer, he’d remind you.) He was also a great musician, a great poker player, and, by all accounts, a pretty loyal friend. But Albini also became well-known for his biting wit, which could cut a beloved band, political movement, or Las Vegas concert venue clear down to the quick in just a single sentence. For years, he took no prisoners, even shitting on bands he’d worked with loudly in the press, a move that led to Chunklet magazine naming him one of the “100 biggest assholes in rock.”

And while Albini walked back some of his fight-picking in recent years, which he explained in this excellent Guardian profile from last year, he still held at least some vitriol for ticket fees, eclipse fans, and people who think Pearl Jam has ever made a perfect record. Below, you’ll find an annotated selection of some of Albini’s killer witticisms from over the years, all in his memory. The world will be worse now without Albini around to hold us all to account.

When Nirvana went to make In Utero, they wanted to hire Albini, in part because they were such big fans of his work with the Jesus Lizard. After a phone call between Albini and Kurt Cobain, the engineer wrote a letter to the band proposing how he’d make the record, explaining everything from what studio he’d like to use to his overall philosophy of engineering. He also went into his absolute refusal to take “points,” or a percentage of sales, on the record, writing, “I think paying a royalty to a producer or engineer is ethically indefensible,” and adding, “I would like to be paid like a plumber: I do the job and you pay me what it’s worth. The record company will expect me to ask for a point or a point and a half. If we assume 3 million sales, that works out to 400,000 dollars or so. There’s no fucking way I would ever take that much money. I wouldn’t be able to sleep.”

After signing the four-page letter, Albini ended it with that above postscript, as well as with an “Oi!,” reiterating his punk bona fides with just 14 short words.

While fans hail Albini’s work with bands like the Pixies, that doesn’t mean he always made the best impression on the actual bands. After recording the Pixies’ Surfer Rosa in 1988 for just $1,500, he went on to roundly shit on the band in the press, telling Forced Exposure in 1991 that the Pixies record he just finished is “a patchwork pinch loaf from a band who at their top-dollar best are blandly entertaining college rocks,” adding: “Their willingness to be guided by their manager, their record company, and their producers is unparalleled. Never have I seen four cows more anxious to be led around by their nose rings.”

It’s a pretty low blow, considering Albini even admits in the story that he thought Surfer Rosa was “pretty good at the time” he was helping make it. His turn could be explained by the the band’s label, Elektra, bringing him back into the fold a couple of years later, when the band needed to record a one-off track for a label compilation. In the Forced Exposure piece, Albini said, “The band had been getting the Big High Building ‘pampered performer’ treatment for a couple of years by then and were consequently bored and dour,” and detailed how the Elektra even sent him a fancy engraved Omega watch after the fact. “As soon as somebody at the pool room offers me what it’s worth,” he said, “I’m going to have a hell of a nice dinner.”

To Albini’s credit, he owned up to his harshness decades later, saying in the press that he regretted what he’d said about the band and even becoming good friends with the group’s Kim Deal. When news about Albini’s death broke, Deal’s other group, the Breeders, posted that they were mourning their former producer and friend, saying, “He built worlds.” The Pixies, on the other hand, posted a very succinct “RIP Steve Albini.”

In 1993, Albini wrote a long piece for The Baffler called “The Problem With Music.” It’s well worth a read, especially if you’re interested in the economics of being in a mildly successful band, which really haven’t changed all that much in the past 30 years. It’s also chock-full of Albini-isms, from why he thinks producers should stop trying to make bands sound like the Beatles (“Fuck’s sake, Thurston Moore is not Paul McCartney, and nobody on Earth, not with unlimited time and resources, could make the Smashing Pumpkins sound like the Beatles. Trying just makes them seem even dumber.”) to why it’s bullshit that everyone with a little bit of knowledge is called a “producer” now.

He also gets into the nitty-gritty of being an engineer, the pros and cons of different recording equipment, and why he hates “trendy electronics and other flashy shit that nobody really needs.” Albini was a fan of analog recording and kept his studio full of equipment that he deemed acceptable, from microphones to aluminum guitars. Tube limiters — which attenuate the dynamic range of a sound — were absolutely not permitted.

There are few bands Albini seemed to hate more than Steely Dan, whom he often colorfully shit on in interviews and on his X and Bluesky accounts. “Christ the amount of human effort wasted to sound like an SNL band warm up,” he wrote in February 2023, following it up with, “Look at yourselves. Calling them ‘the Dan.’ Go trim your beard.” He described an interview he saw with Donald Fagen in which the Steely Dan member said he was inspired by his “deep love of the blues” and then laid what Albini called “his jazz dork hands on the fucking electric piano.”

Albini then landed the plane by delivering the line above about wedding bands and conceding that he does actually kind of like Boz Scaggs, even though, like Steely Dan, he thinks Scaggs makes “cocaine shit music.” Touché, good sir. Touché.

One of Albini’s most storied rants was a 1994 letter he wrote to the Chicago Reader, the local alt-weekly, which is titled “Three Pandering Sluts and Their Music-Press Stooge.” In the letter, which is addressed to esteemed music critic Bill Wyman, Albini calls Liz Phair “a fucking chore to listen to,” says the Smashing Pumpkins are “ultimately insignificant,” and calls Urge Overkill “wieners in suits playing frat party rock,” ultimately signing the letter with a simple “fuck you.”

Critics are only writing about the above bands, he says, because some music-publicity machine told them to, saying, “Watching the three artists you moo about prostrate themselves before the altar of publicity these last 12 months has been a source of unrivaled hilarity here in the ‘bullshit’ camp, and seeing them sink into the obscurity they have earned by blowing their promo wads will be equally satisfying.”

When Diagonal label boss Oscar Powell e-mailed Albini if he could use a decades-old sample of his voice on a track by his band, Powell, he probably just expected a simple yes or no. Instead, he got a long reply from Albini detailing how much he hates dance music and club culture, with lines like, “I’ve always detested mechanized dance music, its stupid simplicity, the clubs where it was played, the people who went to those clubs, the drugs they took, the shit they liked to talk about, the clothes they wore, the battles they fought amongst each other … Basically all of it: 100 percent hated every scrap.” Still, he concludes, Powell can use the sample. As he explains, “I am against what you’re into, and an enemy of where you come from but I have no problem with what you’re doing …”

When asked about the exchange by Marc Maron on an episode of the WTF podcast, Albini even went so far as to double down, explaining that in his mind and at least when it comes to disco, “When you see these mustached schmucks in their silk shirts, it’s easy to be offended by that culturally without being offended by the gay and soul-music roots.”

There was no love lost between Albini and Amanda Palmer in 2012, when the Dresden Dolls front woman was in the midst of asking her fans to not only fund her new record via Kickstarter, but also the string quartet and horn section she said she needed for her tour. (She raised more than $1.2 million on the album Kickstarter alone, a figure that you’d think would more than pay for all of that, to say the least.)

Posting on his own Electrical Audio message board, Albini wrote, “I have no fundamental problem with either asking your fans to pay you to make your record or go on tour or play for free in your band or gather at a mud pit downstate and sell meth and blowjobs to each other. I wouldn’t stoop to doing any of them myself, but horses for courses.” He would never do that, he says, because he values self-sufficiency, something he clearly thinks Palmer does not. “If your position is that you aren’t able to figure out how to do that,” he says, “that you are forced by your ignorance into pleading for donations and charity work, you are then publicly admitting you are an idiot, and demonstrably not as good at your profession as Jandek, Moondog, GG Allin, every band ever to go on tour without a slush fund or the kids who play on buckets downtown.”

After a little back-and-forth with Palmer and her fans in the press, Albini did an email interview with the U.K. publication Stool Pigeon, in which he explained he wasn’t just mad that Palmer seemed to have frittered more than $1 million away, but that she was also asking for fans to come be members of her band on the road, all without pay and under the guise that they’d be getting a supercool experience that only she could provide. “It’s cheapness repainted as generosity and it’s gross,” he told the publication. “Using people in this way, exploiting their good nature for one’s own benefit, is a cancer that taints many enterprises and it always reflects poorly on the exploiter. It’s one of the things I hated most about the old-school record business, the practice of fucking with people who loved music so much they would put up with endless greed and abuse just to be a part of it.”