Creativity Quote by Steve Albini

Albini doesn’t dress this up as industry critique; he frames it as a threat because, in his telling, that’s what it is. “Make no mistake about it” is pure preamble-to-bad-news, the kind of sentence you hear right before someone explains the rules of a rigged game. And then he drops the mechanism: the letter of intent, the seemingly harmless first step that’s sold to young bands as momentum, validation, a “we’re almost there.” Albini’s specific intent is to puncture that fantasy. He wants musicians to understand that the soft paperwork is already the hard trap.

The subtext is about power and time. Labels can wait; bands can’t. Once you’ve signaled commitment, you’ve given the other side leverage: your plans, your morale, your sense of inevitability. “Eventually” is doing quiet work here, implying not negotiation but attrition. You’ll either accept terms that “suit the label” or you’ll be “destroyed,” a deliberately brutal verb that covers the many non-cinematic ways a career gets killed: shelving, legal limbo, reputational whispering, opportunity costs, internal band rot while you’re stuck.

Context matters: Albini built his reputation as the guy willing to say the ugly part out loud, especially during the late-80s/90s era when indie credibility and major-label hunger collided. The line lands because it refuses the romance of being “discovered” and replaces it with a labor reality: contracts aren’t a reward, they’re an extraction. In Albini’s worldview, the danger isn’t failure; it’s signing away the right to fail on your own terms.