Steve Albini’s regretful Pixies criticism: “I’m ashamed”
The late Steve Albini changed music for the better. A purist at heart who spread his version of the punk spirit until the very end, the way he made listeners think about production, commercialism and the very motivation behind their favourite artists was unparalleled. His words were so consequential that he is revered across the musical spectrum, from rock to electronic, with the love from the latter field particularly ironic as he openly hated it.
A key player in the underground’s rise in the 1980s, Albini would come to greater prominence after he produced alternative rock pioneers Pixies’ 1988 debut album, Surfer Rosa. A galvanising moment for the underground, it inspired many future icons who were on the verge of success, including Nirvana leader Kurt Cobain, PJ Harvey and The Smashing Pumpkins’ Billy Corgan.
The record was so influential that not only would Cobain later be accused of ripping off Pixies frontman Frank Black’s favoured loud-quiet-loud dynamics – including by the Bostonian himself – as later typified in Nirvana classics such as ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, but the record also inspired the band to hire Albini to produce their 1993 album In Utero.
After it had changed the direction of music and popular culture, Nirvana were sick of their era-defining 1991 second album, Nevermind, and sought to get back to the dark, blistering cacophony of their early years. According to Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic, when the band were listening to Surfer Rosa in the van one day, Cobain comically decreed that they would have the same snare sound on their next album.
Although Surfer Rosa resonated profoundly with alternative audiences, it failed to chart upon arrival. It took years to be certified gold, which was helped by a 1992 re-release.
Surfer Rosa was a sticky subject for Albini for a long period due to his misgivings about the music and production and his broader thoughts on Pixies. In typical form, he even publically castigated Pixies after the record came out. When the quartet were recording their 1991 fourth album, Trompe le Monde, in the Boston zine Forced Exposure, Albini criticised the group for being “blandly entertaining college rock” at their best and then put his punk ethos in opposition to the band’s alleged willingness to follow the will of the industry.
He said: “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.”
Years later, Albini changed his mind about Surfer Rosa and Pixies and expressed regret at the way he criticised them. When speaking to Life of the Record in 2023, he revealed “I’m ashamed” about what he said about them and re-appraised the record.
He noted that he heard the record occasionally in a bar or in a movie and wholeheartedly believed it “a better record than I thought it was at the time”. Back then, the producer had “conflicting intellectual perspectives on it,” which stopped him from hearing its full effect. Yet, things had changed at the time of the interview, with him struggling to find much to criticise about it.
He did, however, double down on why he was so dubious of Pixies at the time. He explained that when they first started to gain traction in the US, many people in underground circles were “suspicious of them” because they were a touch naive about the inner workings of the music industry. Despite this natural cynicism towards his counterparts from the East Coast, Albini did voice his pure shame at the way he treated them.
He concluded: “They seemed very credulous and I talked about that a little bit with respect to me influencing the album by making suggestions and them acceding to all my suggestions. I wrote some rather glib and unflattering things about that in a fanzine in the immediate aftermath of that record, and I’m ashamed of the way I treated them. They didn’t deserve that.”
