ELECTRICAL AUDIO TURNS IT UP

Steve Albini's iconic Chicago recording studio is reinventing itself after the engineer's sudden death. They're keeping the lights on, and the flame alive.

- Joshua Hunt

On Tuesday, May 7, 2024, Steve Albini ended one long day of work by preparing for the next. The renowned audio engineer was recording the sixth album by a local Chicago band called FACS, which had booked an entire week at Albini's Electrical Audio studios.

When he opened the two-story brick recording complex in Chicago's Avondale neighborhood in 1997, Albini was 35 years old and already the most celebrated audio engineer of his generation. His fame was tied to a set of ideals that led him to reject the title "record producer" and many of the traditions that went with it. It was also inseparable from his having recorded three classic albums that helped define what what came to be called alternative music: the 1988 Pixies record Surfer Rosa, PJ Harvey's Rid of Me, and the final Nirvana studio album, In Utero. The last of these records had an outsize influence on Albini's legend after he insisted on a flat fee of $100,000 rather than taking a percentage of the lucrative profits that he knew would come out of the band's royalties rather than corporate record-label coffers. Then there was Albini's own music with the bands Big Black (1981-1987) and Shellac (1992-2024), whose sound more or less defined the arc of postpunk noise rock in North America.