Bob Mould didn’t set out to predict the apocalypse, but Blue Hearts sounds like a dispatch from the front lines of it anyway. When he wrote “American Crisis” back in 2018—then shelved it for being “too edgy” for Sunshine Rock—the world was only teetering toward chaos. “Just when I thought things were bad two years ago,” he told me, “here we are.”
The Hüsker Dü icon has always been good at boiling outrage down to melody. From Zen Arcade’s existential howl to the polished melancholy of Workbook, his songs have never been afraid to tell you exactly how screwed up things are, or how complicit we all might be in it. But Blue Hearts isn’t nostalgic anger—it’s current events, set to distortion. “The urgency the song had two years ago has been amplified a hundredfold,” he said, speaking from San Francisco as protests swept the country.
Mould and I had first talked about Sunshine Rock when he was living in Berlin, writing optimistic pop while peering back at a fractured America. This time around, there’s nothing sunny about it. He’s watching his old home of Minneapolis burn after George Floyd’s murder, talking about the roots of police unions and gentrification like someone who’s done the reading—and then lived through the footnotes. “It was tough,” he said. “To see such a tragedy, and then to see the city that raised me in that kind of unrest. I remember the exact precinct that burned. I used to live a couple blocks from there.”
For a guy who’s spent his life turning personal turmoil into communal catharsis, the parallels between the Reagan era and Trump’s America feel almost too neat. “Back then,” he said, “you had a television personality backed by evangelicals who ignored a public health crisis until it was too late. Now we’ve got another one. It’s like the sons of the fathers—same script, worse special effects.” He laughs, but not much. The AIDS crisis and COVID pandemic bookend his adult life in eerily similar ways. “You can’t make this stuff up,” he said. “Now six months into complete chaos and inaction, I’ve completely lost faith in the people running this country.”
Still, he sees glimmers of progress—especially in the normalization of queer identity. “For Pete Buttigieg to be gay and that only be a blip in the conversation, that’s something,” he said. “That’s not nothing.” But he’s quick to shift the focus. “Right now it’s about the trans community, especially trans people of color. That’s where the danger is. That’s where the fight is.”
The album doesn’t stay in the political lane the whole time, but it doesn’t stray far either. “It starts pretty hot,” he admitted. “The first few songs are fire. Then there’s ‘Forecast of Rain,’ which gets into my relationship with religion.” Raised Catholic, he tried returning to the church later in life, only to find himself shut out again. “I went back for three years, tried to find a message,” he said. “But the version of religion I see now—backing racists, liars, all this cruelty—that’s not what I learned. That’s not what it’s supposed to look like.”
That song title alone, Forecast of Rain, feels like a thesis statement. This is Bob Mould at his most direct, no sugar, no metaphor. Just three decades of experience crashing into the same brick wall of politics and power he railed against when he was 22. “You know, in the ’80s I had a voice and a guitar and an amp,” he said. “Not much else. So I set out to recall that feeling—1984 next to 2020—and just say, wow, it’s really starting to line up.”
At this point, his frustration feels earned, but his sense of purpose feels sharpened. Blue Hearts isn’t resignation—it’s a call to arms from someone who’s already survived the last revolution. “If you have a voice,” Mould said before we wrapped, “this would be a good time to use it.”
And then, like every great punk elder statesman, he left it hanging there—not as advice, but as a dare.
Listen to the interview above and then check out the videoes below:
