Never one to be bashful about his opinions, Steve Albini was a reliably frank and uncompromising figure who inspired both veneration and consternation at various points in his four-decade career before his passing in 2024. But both as a musician and a recording engineer (he eschewed the term “producer”), Albini's influence over the shape and sound of American underground music was incalculable. Born in Pasadena, CA, in 1962, Albini immersed himself in punk when he fell for the Ramones as a teenager. After moving to the Chicago area to study journalism at Northwestern University, he became a fixture in the city's independent music scene in the early ‘80s. Along with writing for fanzines like Forced Exposure, he played in a series of noisy, confrontational bands, the most infamous of which became Big Black. Meanwhile, Albini's growing skills as a recording engineer for his own band and others put him in increasingly high demand among any act looking to benefit from the raw, unfussy, and powerful sonic aesthetic that became his signature. His work with bands like the Pixies and The Jesus Lizard led to gigs on albums such as PJ Harvey's Rid of Me and—in a controversial move for those who hoped for a more mainstream follow-up to the mega-selling Nevermind—Nirvana's In Utero. For a time, his disdain for the music industry and insistence on working on his own terms made him all the more attractive to superstar clients like Robert Plant and Jimmy Page, who tapped Albini to record their post-Zeppelin 1998 collaboration Walking Into Clarksdale. And even though there was a steady stream of visitors to his Electrical Audio studio, Albini still found time to craft five albums of finely calibrated noise rock with his band Shellac, including 2007's Excellent Italian Greyhound and 2014's equally ferocious Dude Incredible. The latter proved to be the final Shellac album issued in his lifetime, with Albini's eerie score for the horror film Girl on the Third Floor (Music from the Film) (2020) being the last of his own music released before his death at the age of 61.