The Big Black sound remains one of the most abrasive ever committed to tape. They were one of the first bands to seamlessly blend punk, industrial and metal styles into something totally new and their dark, vaguely funkish basslines and beatbox backing pointed forward to audio nightmares yet to come. But what defined Big Black was its signature hellaciously distorted guitars, often bent into unrecognizable shapes.

Specializing mostly in in EPs and singles, the band's first full-length album was 1985's "Atomizer," a towering achievement in sheer hatred. Listen to the digitized guitar screams on "Passing Complexion"; or "Kerosene," a paean to going-nowhere rage ("I was born in this town/Lived here my whole life/nothing to do but sit around home, stare at the walls/and wait till we die") with brooding basslines circling around spark-shooting guitars.

But it was not just the audial horror that made Big Black's songs chilling; there was the subject matter, too. Not only did Albini tell tales of mob hit men, coma victims, murderous rednecks, small-town arsonists and corrupt private dicks—he told them in the first person and grabbed most of them right out of the headlines. The most disturbing example of this was "Atomizer"'s "Jordan, Minnesota," in which Albini narrates the story of a child-molestation ring that was rampant there during the '70s. The jackhammering music overlaid with Albini's grunts, squeals and hollers of "This is Jordan! We do what we like!" makes one feel profoundly unclean long after the abrupt finish.

Unlike most bands, Big Black became even less accessible as time went on: The band's final magnum opus, 1988's forthrightly titled "Songs About Fucking" pushed rage even further. Garbled, hysterical vocals competed with guitars that seemed to be melting down into some kind of industrio-psychedelic horror; other numbers featured guitars and deadpan voices moving in tight, relentless formation before diving in for the kill. They even managed a version of "The Model" that was somehow colder and more inhuman than Kraftwerk's original. Albini summed it up on the track "Tiny, King of the Jews": "Everybody's gotta have something to hate and I guess I'll do/But once I'm through with myself I'll start on you."

Soon after "Songs About Fucking" was released, Durango dropped out of the band to go to law school (which got him credited as "Melvin Belli" in the liner notes) and Albini dissolved the band to start Rapeman, then broke them up and founded Shellac. These days, most of his time is spent producing and/or engineering a list of bands as long as his scarred arm, including P.J. Harvey, Nirvana, Dirty Three, Urge Overkill, the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion—even a Tom Petty tribute and the latest Nine Inch Nails. Hell, it's one way to make the young whippersnappers write you a check after each album.

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