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In 2021, Albini wrote in a widely shared thread on Twitter that he was "overdue for a conversation about my role in inspiring ‘edgelord’ shit".

"Albini also stood out for acting like the biggest jerk in a milieu that was not exactly inhospitable to jerks. In his public capacity as “Steve Albini”, he often came off like the resident wiseass who thinks he’s smarter than everyone else and thus spends his time getting a rise out of anyone who isn’t clever enough to get the joke."

In 1994, after albums by Urge Overkill, the Smashing Pumpkins and Liz Phair brought new attention to Chicago, Albini wrote a letter to the Chicago Reader music critic Bill Wyman titled "Three Pandering Sluts and Their Music-Press Stooge". In the letter, Albini described Phair as "a fucking chore to listen to", the Smashing Pumpkins as "ultimately insignificant" and Urger Overkill as "weiners in suits playing frat party rock". The letter triggered a range of responses from readers.

Writing in Forced Exposure, Albini "savaged" bands he had worked with; he wrote about about the Pixies "Never have I seen four cows more anxious to be led around by their nose rings", and of Poster Children he wrote "They had a really fruity drummer for a while, but I think he died of the syph".

"His contributions to fanzines like Forced Exposure and Matter display a remarkably clear expository style and a vituperative flair that I wish more mainstream writers possessed."

During performances of the Big Black song "Jordan, Minnesota", a song about a child sex ring, Albini would sometimes pretend to be a child being raped. The Guardian journalist Jeremy Gordon wrote: "What might it mean if the most principled practitioner of the venerated punk ethos was a thoughtless provocateur at best, a hypocritical bigot at worst?"

The musician Kim Deal, a friend of Albini who worked with him during recording sessions for the Pixies and the Breeders, said she was shocked by Albini's past statements. She said "I could just break into tears, the human he’s become." The folk singer Nina Nastasia called Albini a "gentleman".

"A lot of things I said and did from an ignorant position of comfort and privilege are clearly awful and I regret them".

He recently put his thoughts into a Twitter thread, ruminating on how much men of his generation misunderstood the world they were creating. Albini never understood what it meant to live as a target. Mostly, he says, because he’s a white man. He did, however, help make it seem edgy to target shoot. “I’m overdue for a conversation about my role in inspiring ‘edgelord’ shit,” he declared in the thread.

In a 2021 interview, Albini said he had been reacting to an impulse in his peers to "soften" their art to make it acceptable. Instead, he wanted to create art "for its own sake" that was "unconcerned with conventions or acceptance". He cited the writing of his friend Peter Sotos, who wrote extensively about subjects such as murder and abuse, as an example of art that was "shocking to your core in the way that the horrors of the reality of those things should be", rather than turning these subjects into soap operas or police procedurals. "There’s something about using that as a vehicle for commerce, as the product that you sell — these existential horrors — and using that as a trinket to get people into a commercial stream. There’s something repellent to me about that."

“honestly feel like I and others in my generation have not been held to task enough for words and behavior that ultimately contributed to a coarsening society.”

eah, I’m with you in that that was an inexcusable choice that band made. At the time, the internet wasn’t a thing yet, so you’d learn about things piecemeal. And one of the things that I learned about was the Japanese rape manga culture. I learned about it by having a friend of ours who worked in the import-export business who was sending us copies of these magazines of Rapeman comics. It was flabbergasting that Japan, which was perceived as being a fairly conservative culture, didn’t have pornography in the way that we did. There were still prohibitions against depicting naked bodies, things like that, so a lot of things were done euphemistically. Because things weren’t permissible in an open way, they festered and became extremely weird.

So you had these sort of rape fantasies being articulated as a superhero [comic], which is simultaneously utterly repellent and fascinating. That was the frame of mind that we were in when we chose that name. Obviously, it’s the product of decades of repression and misogyny being expressed through a different cultural tradition. But for us Americans, the manga just landed on our couch. But I’m not saying that by way of excusing that choice.

I admit that I was deaf to a lot of women’s issues at the time, and that’s on me. Within our circles, within the music scene, within the musical underground, a lot of cultural problems were deemed already solved — meaning, you didn’t care if your friends were queer. Of course women had an equal place, an equal role to play in our circles. The music scene was broadly inclusive. So for us, we felt like those problems had been solved. And that was an ignorant perception.

That’s the way a lot of straight white guys think of the world — they think that it requires an active hatred on your part to be prejudiced, bigoted or to be a participant in white supremacy. The notion is that if you’re not actively doing something to oppress somebody, then you’re not part of the problem. As opposed to quietly enjoying all of the privilege that’s been bestowed on you by generations of this dominance.

That was the fundamental failure of my perception. It’s been a process of enlightenment for me to realize and accept that my very status as a white guy in America is the product of institutional prejudices, that I’ve enjoyed the benefits of them, passively and actively. And I’m responsible for accepting my role in the patriarchy, and in white supremacy, and in the subjugation and abuse of minorities of all kinds.

It’s just been a long and gradual process of me appreciating, on a day-to-day basis, all of the little things that aren’t problems for me that are problems for other people. The broader my circle of friends become, and the more I choose to listen rather than talk, the more I learn about how good I’ve had it every day of my fucking life. This isn’t a noble thing for me. There is an element of shame here in that I should have been wise enough to realize that the reason that I got along so relatively easily in life was that I wasn’t targeted.

When I was growing up in Montana, it was essentially a monoculture. It’s basically all white people of very similar experience. It took me coming to college and getting involved in the music scene before I had any real diversity in my life. The punk scene in Chicago had a very broad overlap with the gay underground in Chicago. So the queer underground and the punk underground weren’t synonymous, but the re-contextualized diagram was a near circle.

In our circles, nothing was off limits. So, it took a while for me to appreciate that using abusive language in a joking fashion was still using abusive language. And it was genuinely shocking when I realized that there were people in the music underground who weren’t playing when they were using language like that and who weren’t kindred spirits. They were, in fact, awful, and only masquerading as intellectuals. That was one of many wake-up moments.

I’m less concerned than I was 30 years ago about trying to make an experience extreme. Specifically regarding the anti-woke comics today, the uncomfortable truths that they’re expressing are genuinely, almost exclusively, childish restatements of the status quo. Or they’re pining for sustaining the status quo that they feel is threatened somehow. I can’t think of a more tragic or trivial comic premise than: Things should stay the way they are. That’s the absence of creativity — it’s a void rather than a creative notion. It’s fundamentally conservative and anti-progress. And I strain at finding humor in the idea that things should not get better.

I wish that I knew how serious a threat fascism was in this country. At that time [the 1980s under Reagan], there was a phone-in hotline for the America First committee that you could call; they were on the South Side of Chicago, and it would play a racist diatribe as the phone message. Everyone in our circle was dismissive of those as being these ridiculous country bumpkins. There was a joke made about the Illinois Nazis in The Blues Brothers. That’s how we all perceived them — as this insignificant, unimportant little joke. I wish that I knew then that authoritarianism in general and fascism specifically were going to become commonplace as an ideology.

. I will mention that if you look at the people that my band Shellac chooses to play with, we try to bring people of different backgrounds, and specifically women, on tour with us. But again, I’m somewhat uncomfortable talking about these kinds of decisions. They should manifest themselves rather than be advertised, because it’s easy to create window dressing. It’s difficult to change your behavior.