Kevin Bronson on June 5th, 2020

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Bob Mould has made a career of channeling despair, disgust and anger into high-velocity, high-volume punk rock. Even at his most sanguine — as on his 2019 album “Sunshine Rock” — he sounds like a man who’s been through the wars. And, boy, does he sound pissed off now.

“Here’s the newest American Crisis / Thanks to the evangelical ISIS / People suffer in the streets each day / While you take a little change from the offering tray,” he rages on his new single “American Crisis,” the first from his forthcoming album “Blue Hearts.” The album, his 14th solo effort, arrives via Merge Records on Sept. 25, three weeks shy of Mould’s 60th birthday.

On “American Crisis,” Mould flashes back to the early 1980s when, as a “22-year-old closeted gay man,” he fronted the alternative rock trio Hüsker Dü. “I never thought I’d see this bullshit again / To come of age in the ’80s was bad enough / We were marginalized and demonized / I watched a lot of my generation die,” he roars.

The album — recorded and produced Mould at Chicago’s Electrical Audio with engineer Beau Sorenson, the album — features Jon Wurster on drums and Jason Narducy on bass, as Mould, grimly draws a line between the past and present.

“We have a charismatic, telegenic, say-anything leader being propped up by evangelicals,” Mould says. “These fuckers tried to kill me once. They didn’t do it. They scared me. I didn’t do enough. Guess what? I’m back, and we’re back here again. And I’m not going to sit quietly this time and worry about alienating anyone.”

||| Stream: “American Crisis”