The Radical Life and Surprising Reinvention of Steve Albini

O n a brisk November day in 2024, a crowd gathers on Belmont Ave. in Chicago outside a two-story brick building, the only hint of its storied significance a red door bearing a lower-case “e” placard. Family, friends, and fans are here to pay tribute to Steve Albini, the venerated recording engineer, who died of a heart attack six months prior at age 61. The City of Chicago is honoring him, giving the street flanking his long-running Electrical Audio studio the designation of Steve Albini Way. 

It’s an apt distinction: Albini’s way — from his unusual approach to recording, which emphasized the live sound of a band and influenced decades of rock music, to his cantankerous screeds, which often warranted accusations of misogyny and racism in his earlier years — was one of a kind. Albini was also a loyal friend whose personal sense of fairness, often delivered with scathing humor, served as his compass. And he had a redemptive sea change in the last decades of his life, one that many close to him attribute to Heather Whinna, who married Albini in 2009.

When we meet the soft-spoken Whinna at the street dedication, she tells Rolling Stone she’s losing her voice, in part due to her profound grief. Five months later, in April 2025, the volume of her voice still ranges between library quiet and an audible whisper, but she’s ready to talk about the love of her life — a detailed interview that lasts through the night. She’s dressed in a lacy, white vintage dress that mirrors the art deco style of her home in Chicago’s Edgewater neighborhood. At one point, she produces the red velvet jewelry box that houses the engagement ring Albini presented her with when he proposed in 2008. It, too, is vintage; the ring was his grandmother’s. 

When he popped the question, she replied, “Yes, of course. But why?” They had already been together for 16 years. She laughs as she remembers what happened next:  “Then he left me there,” she says, recalling that he was on his way to Italy. “Like, fucking only Steve would think this is a normal thing to do: Propose and then leave. Bye.” That scene, with its lack of a socially appropriate response even when asking her to marry him, echoes the terms in which many in Albini’s orbit remember him. He was eccentric. He was immensely talented. He was not easily understood. 

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When Whinna and Albini met in 1993, it was just a few months after the release of Nirvana’s In Utero, which Albini recorded. His reputation — both his skill as an engineer and his acerbic personality — preceded him. Even though she knew of him, she didn’t immediately make the connection.

Her first encounters with Albini were at the Chicago music venue Empty Bottle. A cartoonist who knew them both introduced her to his friend Steve, who told her, “You smell pretty.” Later that evening, he asked her, “Do you know what you need?” She responded sarcastically: “Oh, tell me. What do I need?” 

“He said, ‘You need a boyfriend who’s monogamous and has a steady income,'” she recalls. “Holy shit, do you know my life?” Apparently, he did. At the time, Whinna was working as a night manager at a suburban comedy club, struggling, broke, and fighting often with her then-boyfriend.

Not long after that, they went to a diner across from the now-shuttered venue Lounge Ax on what turned out to be their first date. “I still didn’t know this was Steve Albini,” she says. “We were talking for a while, and he was a smart-ass. And I was like, ‘Who’s this guy?'” But then the Smashing Pumpkins drove up. “Steve started making fun of them. And I was like, ‘Oh, no. This is Steve Albini,'” she whispers dramatically.

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They dated for a few months, and, in 1994, they became exclusive. They lived at the Chicago bungalow where Albini had built his famed home studio on Francisco Ave. and later moved into an apartment inside Electrical Audio in ’96, while it was still being built. They’d spend nearly two decades there before buying a home together.

Whinna got as close a view as anyone of his personality in the early days of their relationship. “He was super smart, and he treated me very well, but he would say inappropriate shit,” she says. Shortly after they began dating, he used a racial slur at a restaurant. “‘Just so you know, when someone comes and kicks your ass, I’m gonna be holding the door open for them,'” she warned him. “He was really shocked, and he’s like, ‘I just think it sounds funny.’ ‘But, well, it’s not funny, and it’s not funny to those people either,'” she told him. “It took him a really long time to understand that.” Eventually, he did.

Kurt Cobain famously said he could overlook Albini’s negativity if the engineer could deliver a great-sounding album, which Albini did time and again. His goal was always to capture the live sound of a band with no studio tricks, simply capturing a raw representation of the music. By the middle of his career, Albini estimated he’d already recorded thousands of releases, each with its own signature bite, a sound only he seemed able to hear and capture.

In the year following Albini’s death, Rolling Stone spoke with dozens of people who knew him best, including Whinna; Albini’s mother and brother; the Electrical Audio staff; and Albini’s bandmates in Shellac, Rapeman, and Big Black. Many of the artists Albini recorded, including PJ Harvey and members of Pixies, the Breeders, the Jesus Lizard, Low, Sunn0))), and others told us how working with him impacted their lives and changed their worldview, and how he evolved as well.

WHEN STEVE WAS growing up, the Albini family moved often due to his father’s job in wildfire research. Frank and Gina Albini already had two children — the eldest, Marty (now a mechanical engineer), and middle child Mona (an accountant, who declined to speak with RS for this article) — when Steve was born in Pasadena, California, on July 22, 1962. They zig-zagged across the country before settling in Missoula, Montana.

“His mouth got him into trouble a lot of times, because he would say whatever he thought,” his mother says. 

Steve was a small kid, which led to him being picked on. He had many interests — model rockets, drawing, baseball, magic shows, and later, acting and photography. “Steve would get fascinated by some hobby or project or topic and focus intensely on it for a year or two or three, and then just drop it,” Marty says. 

The kids grew up hearing their parents’ folk music records, and Steve played the clarinet for a while, but at Hellgate High School, he discovered the Ramones. At first, he and his friends thought the founding fathers of New York punk sounded silly. “Gradually over time there was something magnetic about that first Ramones album that made me play it again and … I realized that it was actually the greatest record that was ever made and that actually that’s how I wanted to live my life — being a goofball with a bunch of my friends and writing offensive and absurd music,” Steve later recalled.

When Steve was 17, he broke his leg in a motorcycle accident. While recuperating, he taught himself bass, and by the summer before his senior year, he formed a band called Just Ducky, which included his friend Heather Gonsior. “It was probably Missoula’s first punk rock band,” she says. “We were absolutely terrible, but we had a lot of fun.”

While in high school, Steve received multiple death threats, which were mostly over the record reviews that he wrote for the high school newspaper, Marty says. 

At home, the kids’ relationship with Frank was complicated. Marty says their dad was “loving, strict at times.” He adds: “He [was] a high-functioning alcoholic. We were kind of afraid of him. He was never violent, but he was a very smart man, very caustic wit, and if that was [aimed at] you, it stung.” 

Around 2000, Gina says Steve surprised Frank with a written tribute over Thanksgiving. ​​”That’s when he told his father that he had [legally] taken his name, Frank, as his middle name. My husband was so touched.” (Frank died of cancer in 2005.) 

In 1980, at 18, Steve left Missoula to attend Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism in Chicago’s Evanston suburb. This was the career his mom thought he’d continue. “I was surprised when he found music that he would keep it up for this long, because I thought something else is going to come along.”

At Northwestern, Albini quickly befriended the members of a campus band called Urge Overkill. Singer-guitarist Nash Kato worked with Albini at the Daily Northwestern, and they bonded over their shared acerbic humor. “They didn’t care who they pissed off,” says Urge Overkill’s Eddie “King” Roeser. (Kato declined to speak for this story.) Roeser remembers Albini behaving like a rock star, “in terms of having a style of his own, having confidence, and knowing that he had the powers of super-intelligence that other people his age just didn’t have.”

Albini supported himself by working 14-hour days as a photo retoucher, and Kato became his assistant. With a DIY mindset, Albini funneled cash from his day job into music pursuits that included recording Urge Overkill’s early music at a local studio. “We were fortunate to have Steve right there at the time when he figured out how to record bands,” Roeser says. “I think he just wanted to learn how to do it.”

BY THE MID-EIGHTIES, Albini was making a name for himself with the persona of a gangly, foul-mouthed creep basking in the worst in humanity. His band, Big Black, played frenetic art-punk screeds about child abuse (“Jordan, Minnesota”), pyromania (“Kerosene”), and gory executions (“Colombian Necktie”). He played guitar with a metal plectrum, so his riffs sounded brittle when compared to bandmate Santiago Durango’s own brawny guitar assaults and the robotic battery of Big Black’s drum machine, which they nicknamed Roland.

At the same time, Albini also penned sardonic, wantonly obnoxious editorials for zines like Forced Exposure and later mouthed off to media about musicians he didn’t like (including his friends’ bands). “He used to write these incredible tour journals,” Jawbreaker’s Blake Schwarzenbach recalls. “One was about being really horny in Germany and trying to find a woman who looks like a male Hitler youth.”

Albini indulged his shtick offstage, too. “When you came to his house, he’d put on some video of people shooting off their own feet or nailing their balls to a piece of wood and trying to walk around,” former Slint guitarist David Pajo says. Albini attempted to give a record the wildly offensive title Hey N—er around this time, but his bandmates refused. 

As cringy and deliberately distasteful as all this reads today, Albini’s antics attracted an audience. The crowd for Big Black’s final bow in Seattle included Soundgarden’s Kim Thayil, Mudhoney’s Mark Arm, and Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain. And Touch and Go Records, Big Black’s label, reported in 2006 that the band’s second and final album, Songs About Fucking, was its biggest-selling album in 1987 and each subsequent year.

Albini’s next band put a bluesy, more groove-oriented spin on Big Black’s snarl, but the band name he picked — Rapeman, taken from a Japanese manga — repelled potential fans. “Believe me, we had other options, and that’s the one that he chose,” says Rapeman drummer Rey Washam, who regrets the moniker. “Everybody that we told the band name to went, ‘Oh, my God. Are you serious?'”

Decades later, Albini had second thoughts about his most infamous band name. “You know, I can’t defend that choice,” he told Rolling Stone in 2014. “I’m proud of the band, I’m proud of the music we made. I can’t defend the name, but I’m also not willing to apologize for it.”

In spite of the controversy, Albini also established a new career for himself on the other side of the mixing desk. In the mid-Eighties, his Urge Overkill and Pussy Galore sessions were done cheaply and quickly, which led to more work. By the mid-2000s, he estimated he’d helmed between 1,500 and 2,000 albums. 

The record that made his legend, Pixies’ Surfer Rosa, arrived in 1988. The guitars snarled and buzzed, and the vocals — Black Francis’ screaming on “Broken Face” and crooning on “Where Is My Mind?” and Kim Deal’s mezzo-soprano on “Gigantic” — surrounded listeners. “The Pixies were a little, dinky-sounding band, and [our label] wanted us to be a little more ra, ra, ra, and they got that with Steve Albini,” says Francis. The album massively influenced the artists whom Albini recorded later, from Nirvana to PJ Harvey. 

Around this time, he was embracing the art of studio experimentation. For Slint’s Tweez, he dangled mics from the ceiling and swung them around singer-guitarist Brian McMahan’s ears, and the group made their own “gigantic tape loop,” using pencils to stretch out the tape. For the Jesus Lizard’s “Nub,” frontman David Yow laid on his back with a mic over his chest. Albini attached another to a stand close to Yow’s mouth and suspended a third from the ceiling. “When we started recording, I would throw that microphone a little bit, so that it would circle around me during the duration of the song,” Yow says. “The phase would be constantly shifting.”

The Pixies’ Deal, who went on to ask Albini to record her other band, the Breeders, struck up a long-lasting friendship with the engineer due to his openness. “He would answer questions [about technology] in plain English, and then he would probably say something funny afterwards,” she recalls. Similarly, he built PJ Harvey’s confidence while tracking 1993’s Rid of Me. “He would say, ‘I’m just recording this, but you made these songs,'” Harvey says.

Meanwhile, Albini returned to making his own music around 1992, playing with drummer Todd Trainer. “He said, ‘Did you ever think you’d be in a band when you were 28?'” Trainer recalls. “That [age] seemed absolutely obsolete, especially from a punk-rock perspective.” Eventually, Bob Weston, a bassist/recording engineer, joined the group to round out what Albini dubbed Shellac. “He loved the name because it was one of the only industrial products made from an insect,” Weston says. 

Truly DIY, the trio planned tours around the weather, positioned Trainer in the front of the stage to save soundchecking time, and never signed contracts. “Steve liked a lot of super abrasive, crazy music that I’d never be interested in — just total noise,” Weston recalls. “I was into ELO, and Todd was super into stadium rock. I think we all shared a huge love for punk, post-punk, and hard rock like Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, or ZZ Top.” It added up to songs that could be both cutting and sarcastic, like the ruthlessly heavy “Prayer to God,” on which Albini beseeches God to smite the woman who jilted him, as well as the man who lured her from him. “Make him cry like a woman,” Albini sings. “No particular woman.”

“I think a lot of people always thought Shellac were scary and mean,” Weston says, “and we always thought the band was absurd, ridiculous, fun, and funny.”

When Nirvana approached Albini about recording their follow-up to Nevermind, he responded with a four-page fax insisting they “bang a record out in a couple of days, with high quality but minimal ‘production’ and no interference from the front-office bulletheads.” He also refused royalties, accepting only a reported $100,000 flat fee for an album that could have made him millions. “We had to prove ourselves to Steve,” bassist Krist Novoselic said in 2013. “So we went in there and we busted out ‘Serve the Servants’ in one take.”

Although Nirvana’s label did, indeed, complain about Albini’s bleeding-raw production, and Cobain later allowed R.E.M. producer Scott Litt to remix some songs, the band felt good about the recording process. Dave Grohl tracked the drums over three days, while Cobain nailed all the vocals in roughly seven hours.

The experience brought many more bands to his door, and in the Nineties, he recorded major-league releases by Bush, Veruca Salt, Cheap Trick, and former Led Zeppelin members Robert Plant and Jimmy Page. Toward the end of the decade, he started accepting outside-of-the-box jobs, eventually growing to encompass quieter, more nuanced works by Joanna Newsom, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, and Low. “You could tell that he embraced the challenge,” Low’s Alan Sparhawk says. 

ELECTRICAL AUDIO OPENED its doors in 1997. “His studio design was a mix between being self-taught and understanding acoustics,” Weston says. “All the stuff he and the band ever did had a real DIY aesthetic. So he was like, ‘Figure out how to do things, read books, have experiences, ask questions, and then figure out how to do it with you and your friends.'”

Albini and his friends, many of whom played in bands, built their punk values into the studio’s walls. The main contractor was musician Pete “Flour” Conway, and Tar bassist Tom Zaluckyj served as the general carpenter. Pegboy’s Joe Haggerty did much of the plumbing, while Weston did the wiring. Big Black and Naked Raygun’s Jeff Pezzati helped with HVAC installation and Naked Raygun’s Pierre Kezdy, who was also a plumber, pitched in, too.

When Rolling Stone visits the studio on what would’ve been Albini’s 62nd birthday in July 2024, a blue jumpsuit dangles on a hook upstairs. The walls are adorned with screen-printed posters from Dianogah bassist and visual artist Jay Ryan, who also helped build Electrical. Studio A, on the first floor, houses two grand pianos, an assortment of instruments, three performance spaces, and a lounge-style control room. Upstairs, there’s a kitchen, offices, lounge, and the control room for Studio B, whose voluminous live room stretches two stories. Much of Studio B’s gear, including the console in the control room, came directly from Albini’s home studio. For an affordable rate, Albini would record anybody, “as long as they weren’t assholes,” says chief engineer Greg Norman, who started at Electrical at age 19 and helped build it out in 1996.

Whether it was the constant work or Whinna’s influence throughout the Nineties, Albini’s friends started noticing a change in him. “He became a nice person,” Gonsior says. “Sometime in the late Nineties, he came to Portland for a concert, and I just looked at him. I said, ‘Where is Steve and what have you done with him?'”

By 2018, Sunn0)))’s core members, who’d gotten to know Albini in his wild years, also felt he’d matured. “In the early Nineties, he seemed like this classic sort of just shitty dude,” Greg Anderson says. “I could never really see him with a woman. He seemed like the Grinch… It was cool to see things had changed.”

Singer-songwriter Shannon Wright knew nothing of Albini’s past when she hired him for sessions and later became his friend. She recalls one night when she was opening for Shellac and a male fan heckled her with sexist taunts. “Steve was so disappointed,” she says. “The fact that it bothered him so deeply meant so much to me.” When she learned about his past, she shrugged it off. “He made some stupid mistakes like we all do,” she says. “It’s just that they’re in zines. Things like that last forever. But he really grew out of those things.”

Albini’s friends who regularly played poker with him — he won two World Series of Poker bracelets in 2018 and 2022, earning enough money to account for 25 to 30 percent of his income — credit him with helping progress their discourse in recent years. Andy Kosinski recalls Albini arguing for leftist politics during games and defending trans people to conservative-minded strangers, and he convinced the group to stop insulting each other with “certain words” people now generally find offensive.

But Albini’s awakening to social justice didn’t happen overnight. Whinna was working at Second City, Chicago’s improv comedy institution, in 2002 when Dana Min Goodman and Julia Wolov told friends there that Louis C.K. had masturbated in front of them in a hotel; 15 years later, their experience became public. (In a statement at that time, C.K. acknowledged the stories were true. “I will now step back and take a long time to listen,” he told The New York Times in 2017.) Albini was a fan of Louie, and he continued to watch the show despite Whinna telling him the story.

Whinna says Albini gradually began to see how his experiences as a white man were vastly different than what others went through, like the time that Whinna had to write a note saying that one of their house guests, a Black woman, had permission to borrow their car due to fears of trigger-happy cops.

The turning point, Whinna says, was the presidential election in November 2016. “We would argue that the majority of this country is racist, that white supremacy is a real thing,” she says. “Steve did not believe it.” They even bet on it. But after Trump won, he couldn’t deny it any longer.

“A lot of things I said and did from an ignorant position of comfort and privilege are clearly awful and I regret them,” Albini wrote in a widely circulated 2021 Twitter thread. “It’s nobody’s obligation to overlook that, and I do feel an obligation to redeem myself.” He said he “expected no grace,” and added, “I’m overdue for a conversation about my role in inspiring ‘edgelord’ shit.”

Keeping his promise, he candidly addressed his past in the last few years of his life. “When you realize that the dumbest person in the argument is on your side, that means you’re on the wrong side,” he told The Guardian in 2023.

His affection for his friends began to outweigh his combativeness. “He was very vocal about his love for his friends. All of a sudden, he would end phone calls with, ‘I love you,'” says Kosinski, his poker buddy. Pajo remembers telling Albini he loved him the very last time they saw each other at a concert in early 2024. “His eyes got really tender. He’s double-masked, but I could tell he was smiling, and he is like, ‘I love you too, Dave.’ And he walked away.”

“His agility in growing and reassessing his own past — that’s an ideal way for a man to be, when the society is lacking for positive male role models,” says Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy, who first met Albini in the early Nineties, when they worked together to produce a record by the St. Louis band Dazzling Killmen. Albini was a fixture at Lounge Ax, whose co-owner, Sue Miller, is married to Tweedy, and they became close friends. “Having a friend that’s such a strong yet malleable personality was really beautiful,” Tweedy adds.

In late April 2024, Albini and Electrical’s Norman flew to France to give an engineering seminar. Albini headed back to Chicago on May 4 for a recording session: The art-rock band FACS had booked Albini to record and mix their album Wish Defense. As they wrapped a couple of days later on May 7, FACS’ Brian Case asked Albini about Shellac’s then-upcoming album To All Trains. “He went into this 30-minute monologue,” Case says. “And he said, ‘Hasta mañana.'”

As always, Albini returned home after that and cooked Whinna dinner. She went upstairs to work on her computer. Not long after, he came upstairs and told her his chest felt tight and that he was going to urgent care. She said she’d take him to the hospital, but then he collapsed down the stairs. “We got a call from Heather that night, and she was in distress, so we ran over to the house,” Albini’s longtime friend Tim Midyett of Silkworm says. By the time Midyett and his wife arrived, the paramedics were already there. One of them took Whinna back upstairs. “I really didn’t want to go,” she says. “I wanted to be right next to him.” 

Albini was taken to the hospital, where the doctor told them he didn’t make it.

THE WORLD WILL remember Albini for the records he helped make and his outspoken, confrontational public persona, but those who got to know him will remember his generosity, brilliance, honesty, and the way he fostered a close-knit community that continues to gather and look out for one another.

Kim Deal recalls talking to her twin sister and Breeders bandmate, Kelley, who told her, “All his involvement in music throughout the years, that’s the least interesting thing about him. He’s got a great perspective of everything. He talks in paragraphs about a topic.”

Albini enjoyed debating friends, whatever the subject. “He seemed like he would be really interested in taking an untenable position and arguing on its behalf,” Tweedy says. “It was a fun challenge to defend something that you didn’t even really think you had to defend.”

And he gave money away freely to anyone in need. “He hated the fact that money had so much power over people’s lives and could destroy people,” Whinna says. “I think that’s what we really shared in common, is that we were both repulsed by greed.”

In the wake of his death, tributes to Albini took place at concerts the world over. At Primavera Sound in Barcelona the summer he died, Pulp and PJ Harvey each paid tribute during their sets, and the festival named the stage where Shellac was supposed to perform after him. Friends held a four-day gathering by Lake Michigan in Illinois to celebrate Albini’s life. Tsunami’s Jenny Toomey held an event at the Chicago venue the Hideout to teach people how to play Albini’s favorite dice game, Kariki. That event raised money for Letters to Santa, the charity he and Whinna started in 1996, which many say contributed to Albini’s positive turns later in life.

And his legacy lives on at Electrical Audio. The day after Albini died, still in shock and having barely grieved the loss of their friend, mentor, and leader, the staff of Electrical did what Albini would’ve done: They got back to work. FACS’ Case recalls getting a call from Electrical engineer Taylor Hales the day after Albini died. “He’s like, ‘Do you want to come finish it tomorrow?'” Case says. They returned the next day.

WHEN WE MEET the Electrical staff for another visit in May 2025, a few days before the one-year anniversary of Albini’s death, the grief is still palpable as they navigate their new normal. We’re in the control room for Studio A, where Albini helmed his final session and two of his jumpsuits — one blue, one green — still hang near the entrance. 

There’s a lot of lore behind Electrical, including how Albini always wore a jumpsuit when working. The origins started during the studio’s mid-Nineties buildout. Albini was gone for months working on Page and Plant and touring with Shellac. The crew kept working, but dust was everywhere during the demolition phase, so they started using jumpsuits to protect their clothes. “We came up with the idea of having a surprise, goofy scenario where he shows up and we all just look like prison camp laborers with full beards in these tattered ‘e’-branded jumpsuits,” Norman says. When Albini returned, he adopted it in solidarity: “He just wanted to be part of the crew,” the chief engineer adds.

Staff share memories from times they spent with Albini in the studio, reminiscing about his love of fluffy coffees; how his cat, Fluss, who lived in the studio, was often credited as a producer on records he engineered; and the devotion he extended not just to those he loved, but to anyone who chose to record at Electrical. Prior to Albini’s death, they had already begun working toward self-sufficiency with thoughts of Albini’s retirement: He’d been talking for years about moving to Hawaii with Whinna. In preparation, Albini had talked to his friend Byron Coley, a fellow former Forced Exposure writer, about selling his personal items. After he died, Coley continued with that plan. Steve Albini’s Closet went wide in early May 2025, with proceeds going to Albini’s estate.

Although Albini died before fulfilling his retirement dream, Electrical continues to work toward what he wanted. “He was, like, the paternal figure of the studio,” Hales says. “This institution will persist, and your ‘children’ will run this place now, and you can ride off into the sunset.” (In 2026, the studio obtained non-profit, tax-exempt status to become the Electrical Audio Foundation, which will be operating the studio in the same spirit in the future, Whinna tells Rolling Stone.)

They’re grateful they got to witness Albini in one of his favorite elements one last time: recording Shellac’s To All Trains. “He’s a totally different person when he’s recording himself being in a band, as a musician,” says Norman. “His shoes aren’t on, he’s running around in socks. He’s excited. He’s giddy, running back and forth.” 

There’s a mystique around Albini, but when asked why he chose this as his life calling, Norman says simply, “It’s just pure passion.” 

“He’s helping create the most accurate document of a band’s life’s work, essentially,”  adds Jon San Paolo, another longtime engineer at Electrical. “There was so much importance that he applied to it.”

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A new generation is already taking up Steve Albini’s mantle. Electrical’s last two full-time hires arrived in April 2023. Like the engineers before them who would tape-op for Shellac, they ran Pro Tools for Albini, who stayed true to working solely with analog tape until the end. 

The blue jumpsuit hanging upstairs from a year ago has moved over a hook, but it remains on the same rack. It belongs to Electrical’s youngest employee, and first female engineer, Lauren “Mac” MacDonald. “I wear it any time I’m running a session,” she says. “It literally gives me confidence.”