In true anti-industry fashion, we didn’t get any advance promo singles or any proper rollout beyond a release date leading up to Shellac’s sixth studio album, To All Trains, but then again, Steve Albini didn’t give us a head’s up that he’d be dying a week before it’s release either. There’s some dark, twisted humor and cosmic irony in the way everything has played out, and while if given a say as to whether he could be alive to see the day or not, I’d wager (although, maybe not against Albini at a poker table…) that the iconic alt-rock producer and Shellac leader would have preferred to be six feet aboveground a little while longer for the occasion.

Still, To All Trains being he and the seminal Chicago noiseniks’ conclusive thought could not have been written as a better epitaph if this was the way the universe decided to have its last laugh with you. “If there’s a heaven, I hope they’re having fun / ‘Cause if there’s a hell, I’m gonna know everyone,” he hails in the album’s final moments on closer “I Don’t Fear Hell”, and perhaps alongside providing some clairvoyant solace from the grave in his sendoff, he, bassist Bob Weston, and drummer Todd Trainer leave us with a last rites of everything that Shellac has been, compacted into a 28-minute-long onslaught of lean, caustic noise-rock accentuated by Albini’s sardonic tongue and arguably the band’s hookiest retreat into the perils of living yet.

In that frame, no singles should have been needed when the whole body swings heavy meat onto the slab as effortlessly as the trio does. The Albinism quips sting on point, and there’s no bullshitting around as they leverage the post-hardcore crank with an eardrum-rupturing stomp in perfect timing and speed as need be. For longtime listeners, To All Trains hears Shellac departing at the top of their game, and for the uninitiated, it delivers you to an quintessential entry point of one of alternative rock’s most uncanny forces from the belly of the damned.

Highlighted: “WSOD”, “How I Wrote How I Wrote Elastic Man (cock & bull)”, “I Don’t Fear Hell”

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

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