Steve Albini, alternative rock musician, audio engineer and producer who recorded albums for bands such as Nirvana and Pixies and founder of the Chicago recording studio Electrical Audio, has died at the age of 61, CBS reported.
Brian Fox, a fellow producer and engineer at Electrical Audio, confirmed that Albini died Tuesday night of a heart attack.
Albini's death came just over a week before his longtime band Shellac released their new album "To All Trains" on May 17. This will be the band's first album since 2014.
Albini was revered and influential in the world of indie rock. He raised the genre in its heyday in the 80s and 90s to a standard that still resonates today.
Albini began his music career in 1981 when he formed the punk rock band Big Black while a student at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism.
He later formed two other bands, Rapeman and Shellac, the latter being the longest-running and perhaps the most important band of his performing career. For Shellac, he performs vocals and guitar alongside bassist Bob Weston and drummer Todd Trainor.
He also helped record some of the most influential albums of the alternative rock era in the 1980s and 1990s, including “In Utero“ Nirvana's "Rid of Me" of PJ Harvey, multiple albums for Urge Overkill and The Jesus Lizard.
He also helped record music for legends such as Cheap Trick, Jimmy Page, Robert Plant and the Foo Fighters, who recorded their hit song "Something from Nothing" at his Electrical Audio studio in Chicago.