1981–1982: Formation and Lungs Big Black was founded by
Steve Albini in 1981 during his second year of college at
Northwestern University. Albini had become a fan of
punk rock during his high school years in
Missoula, Montana, and taught himself to play
bass guitar in the fall of 1979, his senior year, while recuperating from a badly broken leg resulting from being struck by a car while riding his motorcycle. Moving to
Evanston, Illinois the following year to pursue a
journalism degree and
fine art minor at Northwestern, Albini immersed himself in the fledgling
Chicago punk scene and became a devoted fan of the band
Naked Raygun. He also wrote a controversial
column titled "Tired of Ugly Fat?" for the Chicago
zine Matter, publishing confrontational rants about the local music scene which polarized readers into either respecting or hating him. However, he was unable to find other musicians who could play the songs to his satisfaction, later stating in
Forced Exposure that "I couldn't find anybody who didn't blow out of a pig's asshole." Instead, in the spring of 1981, he bought a
guitar, borrowed a four-track
multitrack recorder from a friend in exchange for a case of beer, and spent his
spring break week recording the
Lungs EP in his living room, handling the guitar, bass, and vocals by himself and programming the Roland TR-606 to provide the drum sound. Albini would come to dislike the album, regarding it as too "slavishly imitative" of personal favorites like
the Cure,
Killing Joke, and
Cabaret Voltaire. The EP is described by
Our Band Could Be Your Life author
Michael Azerrad as "cold, dark, and resolutely unlistenable", with the lyrics describing
child abusers and other controversial topics.
1983: Full lineup and Bulldozer In early 1983 Albini met Naked Raygun singer
Jeff Pezzati through mutual friends and convinced him to play bass guitar with Big Black. Pezzati recalled that Albini "knew a heck of a lot about, right from the start, how to release a record and get the word out that you have a record", and that "He jumped at the chance to have a band play his stuff." The two practiced in Pezzati's basement, and one day Naked Raygun guitarist
Santiago Durango came downstairs and asked to play along. The trio clicked as a unit, Durango's ability to rework arrangements and tweak sounds helping to refine Albini's song ideas. According to Albini, "He ended up being absolutely crucial to Big Black." Albini achieved a signature "clanky" sound with his guitar by using metal
guitar picks notched with sheet metal clips, creating the effect of two guitar picks at once. The
Bulldozer EP was recorded with
engineer Iain Burgess and released in December 1983, with the first two hundred copies packaged in a
galvanized sheet metal sleeve in
homage to
Public Image Ltd.'s
Metal Box. Many of the EP's lyrics depicted scenarios drawn from Albini's rural upbringing, such as "Cables", which described the slaughtering of cows at a Montana
abattoir, and "Pigeon Kill", about a rural
Indiana town that dealt with an overpopulation of
pigeons by feeding them poisoned corn.
1984: Touring and label signing Even with
Bulldozer released, Big Black drew very small crowds in their native Chicago. They began venturing outside of Illinois to play shows in
Madison,
Minneapolis,
Detroit, and
Muncie, transporting themselves and their equipment in a cramped car and sleeping on people's floors. Albini handled much of the band's logistics himself, setting up rehearsals, booking studio time, and arranging tours. Looking for better distribution of their records, Big Black negotiated a deal with
Homestead Records.
Gerard Cosloy, who had befriended Albini through writing for
Matter and gone on to work at Homestead, negotiated an unorthodox deal for the band: Big Black merely licensed their recordings to Homestead for specific lengths of time, rather than the label retaining the rights to the recordings as was typical. The band members figured that if a record company were going to cheat them, they would be able to do so with or without a contract because the band could not afford to defend themselves. The lack of a drummer also meant one less member to split profits with, and since there was no
drum kit the band did not have to rent a tour van to fit all of their equipment. Durango, meanwhile, opted to leave Naked Raygun to commit full-time to Big Black. In Chicago he joined a band called Savage Beliefs, and his playing style impressed Albini and Durango, who invited him to join Big Black as they were recording the songs that would make up the band's first full-length album. The band had already begun writing new songs by the time
Racer-X was released, stating in the last sentence of the EP's
liner notes that "The next one's gonna make you shit your pants." Big Black's first
LP, 1986's
Atomizer, found the band at their most musically developed and aggressive level yet. One of the album's most controversial songs was "Jordan, Minnesota", about the 1983 scandal in
Jordan, Minnesota that saw a large number of the rural town's adults indicted on charges of involvement in a huge child sex ring. Riley explained that the song was about the effects of boredom in rural America: "There's only two things to do: Go blow up a whole load of stuff for fun, or have a lot of sex with the one girl in town who'll have sex with anyone. 'Kerosene' is about a guy who tries to
combine the two pleasures." Big Black secured a European distribution deal for their records through
Blast First, a label recommended to Albini by
Sonic Youth, and met enthusiastic responses to their shows on a 1986 European tour. The
compilation album The Hammer Party, combining
Lungs and
Bulldozer, was also released through Homestead Records in 1986, but later that year Big Black had a falling out with the label and its distributor, Dutch East India Trading. According to Albini, Dutch East India's accounting practices were "always fucked. They would do every sleazy, cheap trick to avoid paying you, like send you a check that wasn't signed or send you a check that had a different numeral and literal amount."
1987: Headache, Songs About Fucking, and breakup Big Black's first release for Touch and Go was the
Headache EP in spring 1987. A sticker on the EP's cover read "Not as good as
Atomizer, so don't get your hopes up, cheese!" Durango later remarked that "I was feeling tapped out ideawise. At that point I think we had tried everything that we wanted to try, musically and in the studio." Tensions were also mounting within the band. Albini did not drink alcohol, so Riley and Durango became drinking buddies on the road while Albini was doing interviews and handling the band's logistics. Riley, however, was drinking to excess, and his behavior ruined several of the band's performances. According to Riley, "Big Black was never about that. For Big Black to make any money, it wouldn't have been Big Black anymore." With their breakup announced well in advance, Big Black recorded their final album,
Songs About Fucking, half in London and half at Albini's home studio. At the end of this show the band smashed their instruments onstage. Critic
Robert Christgau commented that "Anybody who thinks rock and roll is alive and well in the infinite variety of its garage-boy permutations had better figure out how these Hitler Youth rejects could crush the competition and quit simultaneously. No matter what well-meaning rockers think of Steve Albini's supremacist lies, they lie themselves if they dismiss what he does with electric guitars—that
Killdozer sound culminates if not finishes off whole generations of punk and metal." Albini himself later considered the album's first side as Big Black's best output.
Post-Big Black in 2007 Following Big Black's breakup, Albini formed and fronted
Rapeman from 1987 to 1989 and
Shellac from 1992 until his death in 2024. Some of his most well-known recordings include the Pixies'
Surfer Rosa (1988), Nirvana's
In Utero (1993), Bush's
Razorblade Suitcase (1996), and Page and Plant's
Walking into Clarksdale (1998). In 1997 he opened his own
recording studio,
Electrical Audio, in Chicago. He was also known for recording almost any artist who requested his services (usually at very low rates for artists on independent labels but deliberately charging high amounts to artists on major record labels), disliking being credited on the albums he works on (insisting on being credited as a recording engineer rather than a
producer, if at all), and refusing to take
royalties for his work (calling them "an insult to the band"). Durango, meanwhile, continued to play music during his law school years, releasing two EPs on Touch and Go as
Arsenal and recording with
Boss Hog. In 2004 he participated in a musical project called Miasma of Funk, releasing the album
Groove on the Mania!, and in 2006 published the book
Blurry and Disconnected: Tales of Sink-or-Swim Nihilism. In 1992 Big Black's catalog reverted to Touch and Go Records, who re-released their entire discography and kept their records in print long after the band's breakup. The re-released version of
The Hammer Party was expanded to include the tracks from
Racer-X. Albini's touring schedule with Shellac did not allow time for the band to rehearse a full set, so they instead played a short set of four songs: "Cables", "Dead Billy", "Pigeon Kill", and "Racer-X". Albini explained that the performance was "not about Big Black wanting to get back together or even an audience wanting to see Big Black, it's that ... to not honor Touch and Go would be an insult by way of damning with faint praise", describing the label as "[not] just a benchmark for how a record label should behave, but how people should behave." During the performance he stated that "You can tell [this is] not something we had a burning desire to do, but we did it because we love Touch and Go [and] we love Corey Rusk [...] When history talks about rock music it has a tendency to skip from the
Sex Pistols to Nirvana, [but] something started in the 1980s and you're seeing the evidence of it all around you", remarking that the label was "the best thing to happen to music in my lifetime, and we did this to say thanks". The performance prompted offers from promoters for further reunion shows, but Albini stated flatly "that is definitely not going to happen." ==Style==