Shellac have just released their final album ‘To All Trains’, nine days after the band’s lead guitarist Steve Albini passed away.
The legendary record producer, or audio engineer as he preferred to be described, was the mastermind behind iconic albums such as Nirvana‘s ‘In Utero‘, Pixies’ ‘Surfer Rosa’ and Manic Street Preachers‘ ‘Journal For Plague Lovers’. He died on May 8 of a heart attack while at Electronic Audio, his recording studio in Chicago.
He also had a highly influential and accomplished recording career, notably as part of the bands Big Black (1981-1987) and Shellac, a noise rock and hardcore band that had been together since 1992.
Their new album is their first in 10 years, and was first announced in March. It follows on from 2014’s ‘Dude Incredible’, and was recorded in four blocks, each spaced several years apart, between November 2017 and March 2022.
Listen to the album below:
The tracklist for Shellac’s ‘To All Trains’ is:
A number of major figures in music have paid tribute to Albini since his death.
“Tonight I’d like to dedicate this song to a friend that we lost the other day, who I’ve known a long, long time,” Foos frontman Dave Grohl told the crowd. “He left us much too soon. He’s touched all of your lives, I’m sure. I’m talking about Steve Albini. For those of you who know, you know. For those of you who don’t know, just remember that name: Steve Albini. Let’s sing this one for him.”
Elsewhere, Yourcodenameis:milo spoke to NME about how the 20th anniversary of their LP ‘All Roads To Fault’ was made all the more profound by the passing of Albini, who engineered the album.
Remembering their time with the punk and production legend, Lockey said: “We paid attention, saw everything he did, asked questions that he would gladly spend ages answering”.
“He once stopped the session and proceeded to give us a lecture on how the peanut built America. He schooled us in billiards, then showed us his favourite cooking shows that he’d recorded. It was all so natural and encouraging, we could do what the fuck we wanted and he’d capture it. That’s the deal, and we fucking loved it.”
Comparing their experience to other bands who had told them that recording debut albums came with “re-recording with different producers, loads of different mixers, A&R bods cutting different versions, edits – all that shit”, Lockey said that the making of ‘All Roads To Fault’ was anything but a chore.
“We had absolutely none of that, just a week in a studio with the dude who made our favourite records steering the ship in the most hands-off but confident way imaginable,” he said. “We’d had the experience we wanted and what would eventually set us up to be the best band we could be.”
Jarvis Cocker has also recalled the impact that working with Albini during ‘Further Complications’ had on him, and The Cribs shared their fond memories of the icon.
PJ Harvey also said he “changed the course of my life” during sessions for her 1993 LP ‘Rid Of Me’., and Joanna Newsom dedicated a version of her song ‘Cosmia’ to him, who engineered her 2006 album ‘Ys’. See further tributes here.
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