The Singles Jukebox, 2024: Steve Albini, RIP

The legen-fuckin-dary artist, engineer, producer Steve Albini died this past May, and TSJ tributed him with many of our writers picking an individual record and writing on it. I highly recommend you read the entire feature — it’s frankly the kind of thing we do very well — but here’s my contribution.

Big Black, “Jordan, Minnesota” (Atomizer, 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 overly 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 seemingly 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.

Edited from my original text: “It’s amazing to me that Al Jourgensen never roped Albini into working with him, because you’d think that on a musical level, they’d totally get each other. Then again, they were probably too similar for it to work.

I’m incredibly sad he died. I’m incredibly glad that, after he did, his work with Big Black and Shellac (but predictably not the very problematically named R@peman) finally appeared on streaming services. Go listen to it; my faves are Atomizer and Shellac’s At Action Park.