Bob Mould Band: Here We Go Crazy

When he calls, Bob Mould is finishing work on his 15^th solo album, Here We Go Crazy. A distillation of the unfailing melodic skill, the emotional lucidity and dynamic fluency he’s developed over more than four decades, it’s also a typically bold realignment of his sonic paradigm. Its turbulent vignettes are scored by Mould’s familiar bruised tunefulness, but the sound is pared back to its fundaments, 11 songs blistering past in just over 30 minutes. “I’ve stripped things back to what excited me as a young guitarist,” he explains. “The energy, the electricity.”

Part of the inspiration for this more primal aesthetic is the heavy itinerary of touring he’s lately undertaken, several years spent circling the globe, either in the company of bandmates Jon Wurster (drums) and Jason Narducy (bass) or just by himself. “I was really throwing myself in the songbook and feeling where the audience is at,” he says. “And they were really responding to this very simple, just-me-and-a-guitar setup. And I thought, maybe I shouldn’t be overcomplicating things, ‘word’-ing or ‘craft’-ing it up. Just grab for the simple bits of life we still have control over: our emotions, our relationships.”

After shows, Mould would hang out signing merch and talking to fans. “Sometimes people bring a lot of their lifetime emotional content to me,” he says, “like they’ve compressed all this coal into a tiny little diamond. Sometimes I’m surprised at the weight of it, the heaviness. I’m like, ‘I’m here for you. I’m listening.’ I’m shocked and grateful they share so readily with me. I don’t know what I did to earn that trust.”

Mould has earned that trust with every record he’s made, channelling his own “lifetime emotional content” for songs of wisdom, honesty and volcanic intensity. His first band, Hüsker Dü, bared his angst over furious noise and turbulent melody, an indelible influence on generations that followed. But by the time Nirvana infiltrated the mainstream, Bob Mould had already moved on, having sequestered himself in a farmhouse to lick his wounds and learn new ways to sing his songs. His solo debut, 1989’s folk-rock masterpiece Workbook, was a record of depth and sophistication. Then he pulled another sharp turn, his power-trio Sugar alloying his most melodic songs with his fiercest noise, yielding his most commercially successful work yet.

Over the solo career that followed Sugar’s own mid-90s flameout, he’s displayed a maturing gift for songwriting, transcending the ‘alternative’ tag and recognised alongside key influences like Pete Townshend and Pete Shelley. He’s adrenalized classic forms, alchemised angst into something addictive and powerful. “I’m just trying to figure myself out,” he says. “After 64 years of life – 55 spent writing songs – it’s what I do.” The concepts that shaped the songs of subsequent albums reflect those years. The ruminative Beauty & Ruin (2014) and Patch The Sky (2016) were written in the wake of losing his parents and other loved ones. 2019’s Sunshine Rock was a homage to the early Capitol singles of the Beatles and the Beach Boys, constant companions through his turbulent childhood. The terse, political Blue Hearts (2020) was written and recorded amid the dying days of the first Trump administration.

Here We Go Crazy, meanwhile, arrives at another moment of uncertainty, a time of disruption and fear. Mould sees the songs unfolding like the three acts of a play, each act exploring distinct but related themes. The first handful of songs concern “control versus chaos”, Mould explains. The opening title track contrasts images of nature – deserts, mountains, fault-lines – with the tumult of human life. Inspired by a riff that Mould says “sounded like a fistfight”, ‘Neanderthal’ is “a snapshot from inside my head as a young kid: growing up in a violent household, everything being unsettled, feeling that fight-or-flight response at all times,” while ‘Breathing Room’ is “about feeling isolated, cramped-up, and literally needing that breathing space”.