Photo by Daniel Bergeron

He couldn’t have known. Usually anyone who drops dead of a heart attack doesn’t typically anticipate such an inconvenience to happen one week before releasing their new album. Still, there’s a great play of morbid, cosmic humor going on with “I Don’t Fear Hell”, the final track off Shellac’s sixth and now-posthumously released album in the wake of Steve Albini’s death, To All Trains. The listen stabs us with the hardest of dark wit from the other side of the void. Acerbic lines have never been lost from Albini’s tongue, and there’s plenty of them abound here. “Something, something and when this is over / I’ll leap in my grave like the arms of a lover,” he mutters over a hardened elasticism of tight-wound guitar alongside Bob Weston’s heavyweight bass and Todd Trainer’s nail gun drum. “If there’s a heaven, I hope they’re having fun / ‘Cause if there’s a hell, I’m gonna know everyone.” When it comes to self-eulogies, these are some last words that couldn’t have been any more truer to form in the case of the underground rock and recording engineer legend, delivered our way from six feet under.

Shellac’s To All Trains is available now on Touch and Go Records.